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Showing posts from March, 2015

Public & Private in Algeria

I am sitting on a bed, drinking coffee in a bedroom that overlooks the courtyard of our house, set in an orchard, by a country road in a village, next to the city, in the east of the middle... the middle of Algeria. Or is it the other way round? I am in Algeria, in the middle of the north... not the middle-east though... near a city, in a village up a country road, by the orchard that leads to our house and its courtyard, sitting in a room, on a bed with a coffee cup in my hand. In this enumeration of geographical locations, I suddenly wonder about space, the private and the public. Societies have divided space in at least two spheres, the private and the public. Private and public spaces are a kind of market, a place where information is shared and exchanged. Both operate with codes on how information gets exchanged. Some things are spoken about in private, and others in public but their borders aren't so fixed that both spheres never meet. In that meeting place, t