(…) seeing that scene a couple of days ago reminded me of my first meeting with Mohamed Bourouissa last year. Before Charlie Hebdo and before he left for Philadelphia. At the time he was moving out, therefore he set up the appointment at his mother’s house at the Défense. “I was born in Blida in Algeria, but I soon moved with my family. I grew up in a HLM in Courbevoie, a village not far from here: a quiet place, a quiet youth. Since my mother moved into this house I always thought the building was a kind of anonymous version of Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse,” he said. An erudite way of repeating that “not so bad.”

“The thing which I find less persuasive about the way the media managed reporting on the suburbs in these years is the insistence on the anger of the people: to me it seems an infantilizing or animal-like feeling, which allows to ignore their motivations.”

It’s surely for this reason that in a lot of the artist’s works everything seems to have been frozen in the moment before something could happen or – and it’s a possibility to be considered – not happen at all. (…)

Buy Peeping Tom’s Digest #4 here.