This article analyses Dreams Have No Titles (2022), a multidisciplinary and immersive installation by UK-based, French-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira. Commissioned for the French Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale, the project takes inspiration from the anticolonial and self-determining spirit of early post-independent Algeria, as well as activist films co-produced in the 1960s, 70s and 80s between Algeria, France and Italy. Following the multidirectional character of Sedira's work, this article first offers an overview of the installation and the many cultural references it contains. It then looks at the artist's mobilisation of personal narratives of migration and diaspora in relation to previous forms of cultural and political struggle, highlighting the cross-temporal and transnational effects of colonialism, but also many forms of resistance to it. It also explains how Dreams Have No Titles amplifies learnings from internationalist filmmaking in Algeria, especially through the prisms of relationality, solidarity and imagined possibility. Finally, the article discusses how Dreams Have No Titles reactivates utopias and political communities through strategies of mise en abyme, audience engagement, multi-platform referencing and do-it-yourself techniques, opening up paths for the production and transmission of transnational, cross-generational sociopolitical knowledge.
Amanda Tavares (Thu,) studied this question.