'When Bourdieu wrote that his observations in the centres of resettlement made it possible to forecast that a lot of those facilities (often in a glib way referred to as concentration camps) would persist the war he was, unfortunately, right. In 2006, a small research group consisting of students of the University of Geneva (Nora Joos, Leila Khelil, Lisa Nada, Nathalie Pigot, Mireille Senn) and the curators of the exhibition ‘Pierre Bourdieu: In Algeria’, Franz Schultheis und Christine Frisinghelli re-visited Djebabra, a former resettlement center and one of the places of Bourdieu’s fieldwork. One of their concerns was to see whether Bourdieu’s assumption that not only the consequences of the resettlement, but even its material architecture would continue to structure the country for a long time even after its independence had come true. They had to discover that the grid of the colonial resettlement camp still existed and indeed has remained instructive for the organization of the social and public space. This little example illustrates the deep influence and the non-reversible effects of colonialisation with regard to the destruction of traditional patterns.'
Franz Schultheis et al.
