Algiers, climat de France

To talk about Algiers, from France, raises memories, wounds, clichés. Stéphane Couturier immersed himself in the largest social housing district and one of the poorest. He managed to penetrate this closed city, a former Islamist fief in the 1990s. Built in the crucial years of Algeria’s history between 1954 and 1957 by the architect Fernand Pouillon, this is a city within a city, 50,000 people who represent all the contradictions of this Algerian society caught between hope and despair. How to capture the atmosphere of its everyday life, of this architecture that preserves an astonishing modernity?