Sonia Chiambretto spent almost a decade unearthing the silent memories of young Algerians, unseen and overlooked by history, as they struggled to find their footing between remembrance, heritage and resistance. Based on testimonies and archival documents, the writer and poet brought their stories to light across three pivotal moments in Algeria’s contemporary history: the War of Independence (1957-1962), the Black Decade, which claimed nearly 200,000 lives (1991-2002), and the immediate future — a period of potential reconstruction — in a non-linear narrative that gives free rein to the ghosts of the past.

Chiambretto interweaves the threads of individual and collective memory across several generations of young people, haunted by atrocities, massacres and quiet unease. Mirroring Hubert Colas’s direction and set design, her raw, vivid and poetic style unfurls in fragments.

The splintered narrative is set within a dystopian Algiers, as imagined by Le Corbusier in the 1930s. The architect’s design for an Algerian equivalent of the Cité Radieuse in France, “Obus”, was a 10 km-long building with a motorway on its roof. A striking metaphor for colonial blindness, this ‘superstructure’ forms the compelling backdrop for the despair and fierce will to live of these young Algerians.