Waiting for Omar Gatlato

by Natasha Marie Llorens

Born in Marseille, trained in the United States and now teaching in Rotterdam, Llorens is a North African scholar with a particular focus on Algerian contemporary art and experimental film. This BOOKS event coincides with Llorens’ current publication and exhibition Waiting for Omar Gatlato, currently on show at Columbia University’s Wallach Gallery in New York. This summer, the exhibition will also tour to Marseille as an affiliated project of MANIFESTA 2020, marking a homecoming of sorts. Featuring texts of anti-colonial philosophy, icons of North African literature, and with reflections on colonial and modernist architecture, exploring what Llorens calls states of ‘unstable belonging’.

Houria Bouteldja, Whites, Jews, and Us, Semiotext(e) Intervention series no.22, 2017

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961, translated from the French by Constance Farrington, with an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre, Penguin classics, 2014

Éduoard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation, 1990, translated by Betsy Wing, University of Michigan Press 1997

Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series, Edited by Leah Dickerman and Elsa Smithgall, MOMA 2017

Ursula K. Le Guin, Dispossessed, 1974, Orion Publishing, 1999

Natasha Marie Llorens, Waiting for Omar Gatlato, A Survey of Contemporary Art from Algeria and Its Diaspora, Sternberg Press, 2019

Samira Negrouche, The Olive Tree’s Jazz and Other Poems, translated by Marilyn Hacker, Pleiades Press, 2020

Jason Oddy, The Revolution Will Be Stopped Halfway, Oscar Niemeyer in Algeria, Columbia Books 2019

Sable Elyse Smith and Cal Siegal, In That Empire, Pacific, 2019

Paul Virilio, Bunker Archeology, 1975, Princeton Architectural Press, 2009

Kateb Yacine, Nedjma,1956, Nederlandse vertaling door Hester Tollenaar, Athenaeum, De Berberbilbiotheek 2013