For decades, the trauma of Algeria’s gruesome independence struggle lay buried deep in Malek Kellou’s psyche, silenced and suppressed to shield himself and his family as he built a new life across the Mediterranean, in the former colonial power. The shield began to crack one winter morning, long after the war, when he came face to face with an eerily familiar monument in his new hometown of Nancy, in eastern France. Kellou was shocked to recognise the towering statue of Sgt Blandan, a French hero of the 19th century Algerian conquest, which had once stood in the town of Boufarik, southwest of Algiers, famed for the juicy oranges that gave birth to the popular beverage Orangina. A symbol of colonial domination, it used to terrify him as a child growing up in the early stages of the 1954-1962 independence war. “Shut up and eat your orange,” his mother would reply when quizzed about the menacing figure. His mother’s words, written in the Berber Tamazight language of Kellou's native Kabylie, are now inscribed on a gleaming metal sheet facing the statue in Nancy, located on the edge of a working-class neighbourhood that is home to many people of Algerian descent. Passers-by, whose features are reflected in this “counter-monument”, are invited to fill the gaps in France’s history and reflect on a colonial past that continues to haunt a large swath of French society and poison both its politics and its relations with Algeria. ‘Statuemania’ A first of its kind, the Nancy counter-monument is known as the Disorientation Table, after the French term for a toposcope (table d’orientation). Its aim is to challenge assumptions about France’s history and invite new perspectives on its colonial past. Positioned upright, the circular table is 1.59 metres tall – the actual height of Sgt Blandan, whose nearby statue is more than twice as large. Inscribed on the metal disk in French and Arabic is a text by Kellou’s daughter Dorothée-Myriam Kellou, a journalist, writer and filmmaker whose efforts to investigate her Algerian roots eventually helped her father open up about the past.