The Algerian Civil War (1991–2002) was preceded by escalating internal conflicts in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Out of this turbulence emerged extremist groups whose campaigns of violence terrorised the nation for over a decade. In rural areas, armed factions established bases and shelters that were repeatedly targeted by the Algerian state; forests were burned as part of these operations, causing large-scale deforestation and environmental devastation.
Hadjazi’s filmed performance, created in collaboration with dramaturg Illyr, offers an embodied response to the psychic and material legacies of this conflict. Through movement, the work traces the intersections of violence, memory, and colonial afterlives. Each gesture revisits a moment of rupture, drawing inspiration from EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing), a psychoanalytic technique often used in the treatment of PTSD. By disrupting the link between body and memory, EMDR opens the possibility for traumatic experiences to be reprocessed - a dynamic that informs the performance’s choreography.
Grounded in research on the war and its aftermath, the work interrogates how colonial and postcolonial trauma reverberates across bodies and generations, insisting on the need to acknowledge and reframe these enduring scars.