Taghrida, the birds singing
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Dates2024 - 2025
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Author
- Locations Tizi Ouzou, Algeria, Mostaganem, Bou Saada
Taghrida is a visual journey into Algeria’s ancient tradition of breeding goldfinches and canaries, symbols of freedom and resistance. Between memory, poetry, and the scars of war, it reflects on the bond between humans, nature, and the need to preserve.
Taghrida is a visual journey through an ancient and still-living tradition: the breeding of the goldfinch and canaries, the Maknin, as they call it here, a custom deeply rooted in Algerian culture, with origins tracing back to the Umayyad dynasty.
Over time, the narrative has expanded, becoming a broader portrait: through a daily practice, the memory of an entire country has been revealed. A weave of lives and encounters, of beauty and wounds, marked by decades of struggle for independence and a civil conflict that deeply scarred both the collective soul and the landscape.
Along this path, the birds’ song becomes a guiding thread. Their voices echo through the streets, filter in through windows, accompany silent gestures. In Algerian culture, birds are far more than mere companions: they embody freedom, grace, and spirituality. They are symbols of resistance, of fragile beauty, of a yearning to rise.
Adding depth to the project are the words of Algerian poets, for whom the bird is a central figure. In the verses that accompany the images, flight becomes prayer, song a declaration of existence, a feather a shard of memory.
During the civil war of the 1990s, the echo of that song grew faint. Forests, set ablaze to push back armed groups, lost their nests. Silence replaced the trill. Yet even in that absence, birds remained a symbol of what endures, of what can return.
Today, aware of the fragility of that presence, many are working to protect it: fighting poaching, breeding with care, imagining a possible return to nature. No longer just to possess, but to preserve. To listen, once again, to the song.
Taghrida is a visual meditation on the bond between humans, nature, and memory. A story that moves between sound and silence, between what is seen and what is passed down.
