Jason Oddy
Concrete Spring

Driven by an abiding interest in how politics and power shape the built environment, my work is sometimes inevitably informed by current events. In November 2010 I was asked to take part in an EU sponsored artist's residency in Algiers. As a result I encountered the largely forgotten Algerian legacy of legendary Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. When the following month the Arab Spring erupted in neighbouring Tunisia I began to consider how, four decades on, Niemeyer's extensive post-independence Algerian projects might be relevant to the unfolding situation across North Africa.

For the next three years I planned and executed the series Concrete Spring, eventually spending a month photographically immersed in the two university campuses and Olympic sports hall Niemeyer built in Algeria. Confronted by an architecture intended to enfranchise rather than regulate its occupants I attempted to convey this ambition by supplementing my earlier monolithic approach with new ways of conceiving and displaying my work. Employing strategies such as multiplicity and reconfiguration, my aim was not only to identify immanent relations of power but also to point towards things that are desired or have been experienced. Above all though, I wanted to ask whether the ideas embedded in these places that had been designed to forge and empower Algeria's postcolonial generation might be reinscribed into the political discourse of today.

After numerous exhibitions and published articles, I received a Graham Foundation grant enabling me to further my research. Subsequently my monograph The Revolution Will Be Stopped Halfway: Oscar Niemeyer in Algeria was published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City (New York, 2019).