They sit there, caught between two worlds. On one side, the Jardin d’Essai, once a site where exotic plants were acclimatized under colonial rule. On the other, the National Library, a temple of knowledge and the ambitions of a youth that has been abandoned. Between the two, a square where these young men repeat the same gestures every day—a sweet coffee, a cigarette, an endless conversation about a future that never arrives. They are the Sisyphuses of modern times, condemned to roll their daily lives forward without ever reaching the summit.
They speak of survival, of boredom, of a future that does not exist. The word that always comes up is dégoutage—a total rejection of the present, a saturation in the face of a world that has left them behind. Too educated for the informal economy, too socially downgraded for upward mobility, they oscillate between anger and weariness.
Through tight portraits, this project captures faces marked by waiting, bitter irony, resignation. These expressions narrate a youth held back, frozen in suspended time. Their discussions touch on the future, always with a cynical detachment, as if it were an improbable thing.
The Jardin d’Essai acclimates foreign species; the Library houses inaccessible knowledge. But where are they supposed to take root? This project questions the place of a generation drifting between promises of modernity and a reality of exclusion. An attempt to document Algerian absurdity: a country rich in dreams but where the horizon fades too quickly.
