In May 2020, just after the assassination of George Floyd, a transnational movement emerged for the desacralisation of statues of historical figures in public space, giving rise to a globalisation of the memory of colonisation and slavery, making the historical statue an immediate focus of critical debate in the public arena. Statues serve to commemorate the greatness of men and nations, bearing witness to a past of exploits and civilisations, and to the civilising missions of so-called primitive peoples, in what is known as statomania (personified form), while the unsettling of statues is the decomemoration of a colonial history, so that in the end the empty pedestals embody the memory of colonised peoples. On the eve of the organisation of the 1978 African Games, the Algerian authorities asked the sculptor M'hamed Issiakhem to redesign a colonial statue. The artist chose to enclose the statue with another sculpture, or rather with a white plaster form featuring two hands breaking a chain and the face in relief of an FLN soldier. The hidden sculpture is Le Pavois in homage to the North African and French soldiers of the Great War, by Paul Landowski. The act of concealing the statue is an erasure of a memory, that of colonial France and the First World War, to reveal that of the Algerian revolution.

Between commemorative statues and empty pedestals that are a global memory of colonisation and slavery, our project analyses the impersonal form that statues might have taken in public space if Europe, as a civilising project, had never existed.

Fares Yessad was born in 1987 in Bejaïa (Algeria). A visual artist, he trained at the Beaux-Arts in Algiers, where he specialised in sculpture. His work is strongly influenced by his immediate social environment. He created the illustrated character "Moh", through which he depicts a true Algerian social fresco. His pictorial work, emblematic for its mask-like faces, is rich in graphic details and pictograms derived from symbols taken from the Berber tradition. His great interest in public spaces led him to devote himself to street art. He co-founded the collective LIKIP, with which he exhibited Untitled 01 (2016) and Delirium (2017).

Driven by his reflections on his relationship with the city, Fares wrote his thesis on play practices and objects in the urban environment, which resulted in an installation entitled "Roulma" at the Picturie Générale 3 in 2016. His questioning of the uses of public space culminated in "Alger en boucle", an illustrated sound book tracing an urban journey through the city, which raises questions about the birth of urban traditions, which he exhibited at the Carthage Contemporary Art Days in 2018. For the Jiser Reflexions Mediterranes residency in 2021, he will present a mural based on the stories of migratory journeys. He currently lives in Saint-Denis, on the outskirts of Paris, where he teaches and works on projects linked to the collective memory and current affairs of immigration, particularly through urban space.