Book annoucement - A new historical source about Libya and Tunisia during the Italo-Ottoman war (1911-1912)

Pierre SCHILL Discussion

Pierre Schill, Réveiller l’archive d’une guerre coloniale. Photographies et écrits de Gaston Chérau, correspondant de guerre lors du conflit italo-turc pour la Libye (1911-1912), Créaphis, 2018, 480 pages and 230 photographs.

With contributions from art historian Caroline Recher, critic Smaranda Olcèse, writer Mathieu Larnaudie and historian Quentin Deluermoz. ISBN 978–2–35428–141–0

http://www.editions-creaphis.com/fr/catalogue/view/1171/reveiller-l-archive-d-une-guerre-coloniale/?of=14

 

Gaston Chérau (1872-1937), a French novelist from the Belle Époque and an amateur photographer, became a war correspondent during the Italo-Turkish conflict for Libya (1911-1912). From Tripoli and Tunis, he took 230 photographs, wrote articles for the newspaper Le Matin and a private correspondence to his wife. In 1926, Chérau published a reminiscent text about his north african experience. This archive reveal how this neophyte lived in Tripolitania and Tunisia and faced a war in a colonial context. Being somewhere else confronted him with the prospect of being dead and far from home. By immersing us in the work and daily life of a reporter in the early days of photojournalism, this unpublished documentation and its historical analysis reveal how this witness is tugged between his mission to report events and his manipulation by the belligerents and newspapers. It shows how this experience condenses multiple issues - mainly economic, political and ethical - linked to the making of current events. It is only by restoring the share that belongs to each of the protagonists in the construction of the journalistic narrative that we can measure the way in which the war correspondent, a singular witness generally unquestioned in the historiography of war, engages his responsibility. If this book is a new source contributing to the historiography of European colonialism in North Africa as well as a testimony to daily life in war time, he also document the landscapes and urban planning of the cities of Tunis and Tripoli before the Italian urban developments.

The second short part of the book offers a reflective analysis of the "Splitting the Hardest Heart" (« A fendre le cœur le plus dur ») project, which led to the sharing of this historical source with French artists and an exhibition. These artists are two writers, Jérôme Ferrari (Goncourt Prize 2012) and Oliver Rohe, a visual artist, Agnès Geoffray, and a dancer-choreographer, Emmanuel Eggermont. The production of the exhibition brought the archive into resonance with these creations and the works of other international contemporary artists who have addressed the issue of witness, memory and violence of war in different contexts : works from Kader Attia, Rossella Biscotti, Broomberg&Chanarin, Alexis Cordesse, Agnès Geoffray, Lamia Joreige, Rabih Mroué and Estefania Peñafiel-Loaiza. By mixing history and contemporary views, our book proposes a reflection on the different ways of appropriating the past and the current stakes of the use and writing of history.