Mapping The Plague
2018
Other
Materials: Chart made of photographic reproductions, handwritten texts, and annotated copies in English and French of The Plague (Camus, 1947)
Collection: Courtesy ProjecteSD, Barcelona.
Albert Camus’s The Plague takes place in Oran, Algeria, somewhere in the 1940s, about ten years before the Algerian Revolution against French colonial occupation began. Yet, the word "Arab" only appears twice in the novel – the indigenous population is clamorously absent from the plot. In Mapping The Plague, García structures the novel in 10 parts and relates these ten parts to different images pointing to Camus’s contradictions, a resistance fighter who yet found the domination of Algeria by France as something natural. The images come from films such as The Battle of Algiers by Gill Pontecorvo or The Stranger by Luchino Visconti, as well as historical photographs of, for example, the Algerian Revolution, the Paris Commune.
