english text 171 movements, but, on the other, they have another, much more unknown aspect in which there are a great many actions and experiences that are outside that control. We can find something of all this in the works of three artists in the exhibition. Xavier Arenós (Spain, 1968) is exhibiting his “map” Schengen: El Castillo (Schengen: The Castle), 2007, in which, with clear references to Kafka, he speaks to us about the difference between being intra muros and being extra muros, inside or outside a system that is attempting to raise the highest walls to protect itself from the “barbarians”; but Arenós also calls our attention to what happens on the boundaries, at the borders, in those blank spaces, stretches of no-man’s-land, which may provide cover for all that is most abject and undesirable, most sombre and violent (and therefore also most illegal and uncontrolled) on each shore. At the same time, the Algerian artist Zineddine Bessai (1985) is showing her cartographic “guide” H-OUT, 2010, a guide (more conceptual than geographical) that could be used by those who are trying to reach Europe by boat from North Africa. A “political” map in which everything has an ironical tone, with wordplay in the names given to the various countries and with the Mediterranean Sea converted into “The Mediterranean Death”. The title is also a play on words, because hout means fish in Algerian and “out” in English means outside, beyond the borders; and so the harragas (the people who “burn” the borders, and also their papers and their past) say “Je préfère être mangé par les poissons que par les vers”, which means that it is better to die in the sea in the attempt to get out than to die on land. And with regard to that need to travel, to seek new paths in that “journey of hope”, Bouchra Khalili (Morocco, 1975) has also created some wonderful subjective maps called The Constellations, 2011. In her maps she succeeds in making the viewer reflect on contemporary migrations, their geography, their history and the images that they construct. Eight maps that tell us about eight journeys made by migrants between South and North, crossing the Mediterranean, making their way to another country and beginning their exile. We see the names of towns in various continents set against an intense blue background and joined up by lines of dots that draw strange geometric figures, reminding us of the constellations that guide our journeys and our dreams. This subtle, poetic way is also selected in her work by Yto Barrada (Morocco, 1971) to consider the question of “passage”, passing from one shore to another, from one culture to another. “What I want to show”, she says, “is the inscription of this stubborn urge for departure which marks a people” – this desire to make their way to the West, to the Eden of their dreams, which drives thousands of desperate people to try to cross the Mediterranean. For this reason, the photographs that make up her series El Estrecho: Un viaje lleno de agujeros (The Strait: A Journey Full of Holes), 1997–2004, are polarised around the waiting of the candidates for migration who are faced with the inflexible problems of the borders (the Strait of Gibraltar as an obligatory point of passage), images that emphasise the suspension of time, the dead calm that precedes the diaspora and, often, shipwreck. In the photograph Corniche, 1999, we see a boy wearing “Western clothes” (in the bottom part of the picture) who is holding a large model sailing boat, a symbol of the desire to travel to some destination; opposite him (in the upper part), a group of women wearing traditional clothes is preparing to cross the space that separates them from the boy. The viewpoint of the picture intensifies the distance between them and emphasises the asphalt space that mediates between them as a metaphor for the sea and its dangers, something seen as being close but at the same time inaccessible. In this series, Yto Barrada reflects on the state of anxious waiting that fills the air in the city of Tangier and that has gradually dominated the whole realm of personal and social relationships there. These pictures can be read as fragments of the language of the paralysis, pain and fragile resistance of people to a city and a country in which they have lost all interest. As she herself says, when you spend all your time on the edge, wanting to jump to the other side, you turn your back on what is happening around you. That is why the people in Yto Barrada’s photographs are not looking at the viewer – an attempt to show a clear distancing from us, from themselves and from the political history of their own country. One has the sensation that they are posing for a theatre choreography in which the artist has clearly arranged the various elements, in which the scanty interaction between them shifts the focus entirely onto the city. Yto Barrada rejects any kind of dramatic atmosphere and concentrates on everyday situations in which seated figures watch and wait as dumb witnesses of a monotonous event (Salle de billard Billiard Hall, n.d.), and she shows abandoned and impoverished areas and places in the city (Terrain vague Waste Land or Quartier Saddam, n.d.) which contrast seriously with the thrust and presence of tourism (another kind of mobility), which is only interested in “genuine ethnicity”. Barrada’s pictures reflect static situations that demand our attention and make us reflect about a reality that has nothing to do with the exoticism that imbues most of the views of those countries. The city that appears in her photographs is Tangier (her parents’ city), which has changed from being an international ghetto where many different cultures mingled (in the 1950s and later, writers such as Paul and Jane Bowles, Tennessee Williams, Jack Kerouac and Truman Capote converted this city into a melancholy, mythical place in which to seek refuge) and it has become a strange space in which all the dreams of abandoning the country are concentrated, a city in which thousands of hopes and illusions run aground and where mobility has acquired a unilateral meaning (only from North to South), creating a strange situation in which thousands of people wish to leave the city but cannot and
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