Note from the author
“I wrote CHTO Interdit aux moins de 15 ans, 12 Sœurs slovaques and Mon Képi blanc, which were published separately as poetry texts by Inventaire-Invention and later compiled by Actes Sud-Papiers in the digest CHTO suivi de Mon Képi blanc et 12 Sœurs slovaques. I then published Zone Éducation Prioritaire, Une Petite Randonnée P.R. (Actes Sud – Papiers) and Polices ! (GRMX), and am now completing GRATTE-CIEL.”

Gratte – Ciel
“Based on Skype conversations with young people living in Algiers, Canada, the USA and France, I wrote a “text” – or poetic document – in ten parts. The writing combines original text, testimonies, archive documents (UN, literary archives (IMEC) etc.), sketches, notes, maps, extracts from the Internet and recent news broadcasts. The mix creates a narrative that gives a voice to different young people - students, terrorists, reformed criminals, policemen, soldiers, kamikazes – and allows for characters, places, events and languages to emerge. Characters and their real-life doubles, in a contemporary city.
1 Some were born in the nineties, during the dark decade (years of terrorism). Boys and girls. They live in the hills above Algiers. They study. They spend their nights at la Stresa, le Pacha, le Hilton. They are into DJs, drink alcohol and try to buy MDMA. They hang out on military zones on beaches… Lonely for the most part, they are torn between a political culture that still thrives on stories of the country’s liberation war, and the everyday vacuity of the Algerian jet-set. They fly from airport to airport in France, Canada, Belgium, the US, Algeria. They listen to music, pretty loud.
2 The others were born between the eighties and the nineties. Boys. They live in the city’s working class and poor neighbourhoods. They spend their nights hanging out by the tower blocks of big estates. Some are recruited by the police, by anti-terrorist units. They hover above the city like super-heroes. They listen to music, pretty loud.
3 Allah Akbar. To fear God or not. The idea of God is present for all of them.
High angle, low angle - space is represented by :
A. The roof terrace of the sky scraper (manifesto/map) designed in the 1930s by Le Corbusier as part of the OBUS project (a plan for the renovation of Algiers which was cancelled in 1942) will represent the narrative space. In the narrative, the presence of the sky scraper, like a ghost of colonial history, turns Algiers into a fictional space.
B. Algiers’ new underground network. The construction works were interrupted in the 1980s, leaving the city looking like a giant building site. The number 1 line of the Algiers underground, inaugurated in July 2011, follows the route of the OBUS project.”
Sonia Chiambretto