english text 170 risk of their own lives. In fact, the number of people who die in the attempt is constantly growing in a way that is utterly unbearable. We are speaking of a diaspora of desperate people that dare to set out on what is known as “the journey of hope”, which was described as follows (in the newspaper of the German Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia in 2015) by an Eritrean woman who dared to make the journey: “You flee from a country where you cannot always go to school. You run from a country where you cannot work as you wish. You escape from a country that does not allow you to be who you ARE. You run, despite knowing that this journey of hope could hold in store death, hunger, thirst, and harassment. But you run just the same, because it is better to die rather than accept all this, better to die trying to change your life rather than accept all that without doing anything.” In this second part of the exhibition (called “fright”) we are showing the work of a group of artists influenced by that “journey”: men and women from very different countries (Algeria, Palestine, France, Lebanon, Switzerland, Morocco, Spain and Albania) who have in common the fact that they show the perceptible personal world of their culture related to their own experiences while at the same time making a deep reflection on aspects of deep social, cultural and political importance. They are all contemporary artists who in their individuality seek the best way to express their relationship with the environment, i.e., they exchange ideas and expound their experiences using various artistic languages connected with their identity, not with a restrictive or chauvinistic identity but with a somewhat plural and confused “identity” that articulates their personal and social, local and global history, linked to their view of the relationship between Europe and North Africa or the Middle East. It is in this sense that we must understand the quotation that begins the second part of this essay and that comes from one of the posters of Yto Barrada’s series A Modest Proposal, 2012, which may give us an idea of the sensation of weariness felt by many of those artists when constant reference is made in their work to issues such as ethnicity or colonial history, often based on prejudices and distorted views, when the reality of those countries and of those artists’ works is much more varied and complex than what people tend to suggest. Perhaps many of them are closer to the words of the writer Faïza Guène, of Algerian origin, when she writes “Like Rimbaud said, we will carry in us ‘the sobs of the Infamous … the clamor of the Damned’”, in order to give an account of their own personal experiences. All the works shown here avoid facile discourses close to propaganda or to Manichean moral judgements, setting out from the material of everyday life, i.e., from all that is related to different ways of living, patterns of personal behaviour, memories of places, dreamed-of exiles, voluntary or forced migrations, war and constant violence; which leads them to be more attentive to the social phenomena and problems of their original communities, thus revealing the (complex and contradictory) cultural discursive particularities without disdaining the aesthetic forms that express them. One of the most significant examples of what we wish to say can be found in the projects that Ursula Biemann (Switzerland, 1955) is presenting in the exhibition. In them she analyses the Maghreb as an area of migration in transit in which she seeks to visualise the strategies of survival that people devise to get to Europe. The three videos by her that are featured here tell us about how the borders and the constant mobility between the two shores are understood as real geographies, or rather (according to Biemann herself and in agreement with Saskia Sassen) as counter-geographies, a visual way of tracing territorial and human relationships. “For me,” she says, “counter-geography is the unauthorised, subversive practices that, for example, get round the regulation of the state and its borders. I am infinitely more interested in representing those irregular practices than the official geographies of power and control.” Her interest is especially focused on counter-movements, on those unstable, precarious and often improvised practices, because for Ursula Biemann space is not to be understood as a fixed or immovable entity but as something relational and dynamic that affects not only spatial aspects but also matters connected with family and work. We can find these ideas in the videos by her projected in Between Myth and Fright. In Europlex, 2003, she focuses on the border between Morocco and Spain and on the obscure paths created by the “domestics” (Moroccan women who dress up in various layers of clothing to pass objects from one country to the other), a series of trajectories on the territorial borders that originate a new economic, vital and cultural space parallel to the established one. In X-Mission, 2008, set in Palestine refugee camps in the Middle East, the refugee camp is understood (following Giorgio Agamben) as a space of exception that develops in a regime of extraterritoriality in a geographical area, such as the Middle East, which is totally perforated by extraterritorial spaces. And in Sahara Chronicle, 2006–09, which focuses on the trans-Saharan migratory systems that start at four geographical points (Agadez, Nouadhibou, Oujda and Laayoune), she offers a much broader view than usual about the motivation and social organisation of the migrants (the term “immigration” refers to a temporary individual movement, and the term “migration” to a large displacement of population), decriminalising their activities and divesting the images of urgency or drama. The three videos are extensive anthologies that show counter-geographies based on an accumulation of experiences of various social practices. These extraterritorial areas (which I mentioned earlier) exist at the borders, they are areas that have a doubly ambiguous nature because, on the one hand, in them there is the maximum institutional control of bodies and
Entre el mite i l'espant
To see the actual publication please follow the link above