Mise-en-scene (scene 1) - Part of the installation Standing Here Wondering Which Way to Go (in four scenes)

Commissioned by Jeu de Paume, Paris, France; IVAM, Valencia, Spain; Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal; Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden.
Mise-en-scene (scene 1) - Part of the installation Standing Here Wondering Which Way to Go (in four scenes), 2019
Video projection made out of decaying found footage rushes

mise-en scène (2019), exemplifies Zineb Sedira’s approach to filmic reflections. It is composed of eight minutes of found footage spliced together from several sequences of militant films made in the 1960s onwards. The piece exposes the relationship between cinema, collective memory and anticolonial activism in Algeria. Other parts of the footage show traces of time as a result of the deterioration in the film's chemical composition creating abstract, rhythmic patterns with granular textures. Here, we see Sedira directly reference experimental filmmaking and the structural films of the 1960s, an approach that rigorously opposes cinematic convention and that explored non-narrative forms.