Page 21 - Studia Universitatis Hereditati, vol 11(2) (2023)

moved and connected their Algeria to Marseille,
Carnoux, La Ciotat, Créteil, Lyon or Alicante,
transformed into synecdochal places (Baussant
2002). Here, in Nîmes, a shrine dedicated to the
Virgin of Santa Cruz, the sanctuary, which du-
plicates the first sanctuary in Oran while adapt-
ing its architectural forms to the context of ex-
ile and France, symbolised Oran, Oranie and
Algeria; a Saint Michael’s Day procession in the
streets of La Ciotat ‘revived’ the village of Mers
el Kebir, where the same procession once took
place on Saint Michael’s Day, and was a copy of Fig. 5: In the middle of the Mediterranean, somewhere
the one that was held on Procida, an island in the between Algiers and Marseille or Marseille and Algier? 21
Year unknown, before 1962 (source: Michele Baussant
Bay of Naples.
ti ries and multiple topographies produced by Personal Archive)
They also reinscribed alternative histo-
and within the colonial framework. The diver- each installation, was a new origin, a new filia-
tion, without erasing the previous strata.
ta sity of the people living in this framework and lonial and trans-imperial spaces during the co-
By moving to Algeria and back in trans-co-
who reshaped the landscape according to their
needs, partially erasing or superimposing them-
their substitute lands for Spain, Italy, Malta and
selves on previous landscapes, inspired them. I lonial period, their ancestors had imagined here
di the visible and invisible frontiers of these sedi- Oran, the tutelary figure of Nuestra Señora d’El ‘between myself and myself lies my true country’ ...
their sometimes completely displaced villages: in
learned about people’s attachment to crossing
mented topographies of places and times. I expe-
Salud, better known as Our Lady of Santa Cruz,
9
symbolised an ‘eternal’ portion of Toledo and
rienced it before understanding later how their
here co and Egypt covered up the experiences of oth- with French shrines such as Notre Dame de la
Spain at the same time as it became a relay point
memories of exile in Algeria or Tunisia, Moroc-
Garde in Marseille. In Aïn-Tedelès, a village in
er exiles and referred to other absent people and
places. For those born in Algeria, their relation-
Oranie, a new plantation of a grove of Aleppo
pines became a Bois de Boulogne to recall France
ship with the country was not just one of living
and Paris, which also existed in Algiers, while in
there and being uprooted from it. It was also the
Mers el Kebir, the villagers of Procida ‘gathered’
story of other journeys, those of their ancestors,
to Algeria, of different times and places they
studiauniversitatis
Multiple strata, therefore, linked long and
brought with them and anchored in that coun-
short temporalities, distinct places, people and
try. The particularity of these cartographies of around the statue of Saint Michael.
time and space shaping daily life also lay in this objects, landscapes, values and heterogeneous re-
succession of multiple mobilities over the mid- sources: Procida recomposed in Mers el Kebir,
term, whether integral parts of a life project or then Mers el Kebir and Procida in La Ciotat, and
forced upon them. It blurred the relationship be- Mers el Kebir and La Ciotat in Procida. Materi-
tween here and elsewhere, at once the place of al artefacts brought back from Spain, Italy and
settlement, the cultural homeland, the land of Malta to Algeria, then from Algeria to France,
birth, the land of ancestors, the land of passage, Spain, Italy or Malta, duplicated, recreated, tak-
in a temporality and a relationship to space that 9 In 1509, the Cardinal of Toledo, Ximénès de Cisneros, ac-
produced translations but never the possibili- quired the spiritual administration of the city of Oran and
its territory, which were attached in perpetuity to the ar-
ty or the projection of a return. Each departure, chiepiscopal see of Toledo.