english text 172 therefore have to stay in it against their will, producing a strong feeling of absence, of not belonging to it or to any other place. We can also see that feeling – a mixture of melancholy and of being stranded, of being at the middle of a crossroads and having no way out – in the work of the artist Zineb Sedira (1962). Born in France to Algerian parents, she lives in London (which gives her a fairly intercultural view), and it was not until 2003, after the civil war had ended, that she travelled to Algeria to visit her parents. She then began making a series of works in which she explores the Algerian landscape in a very warm, personal way, but also, in these works, she does not avoid relating her personal experiences to historical or political aspects, concentrating especially on questions connected with the desire for mobility, the desire of many of the country’s citizens to leave, as can be seen in the photographs that appear in the exhibition. In the diptych Transitional Landscape, 2006, a man sitting with his back to us is looking calmly and silently at the sea that separates him from the other shore and perhaps, too, from his dreams and desires – a calm sea that invites one to cross it; and in The Lovers I, 2008, there are two old, rusty, useless ships which have been run aground near the beach and which are leaning against each other so as not to fall apart. These photographs help us to understand travelling not so much as a physical journey but as a mental (cultural, ideological) transit that goes much further than the kilometres that separate two countries or the distance that there may be between two shores. A rather melancholy idea that interweaves the urgent need to leave with the desire to remain, which often produces a very profound feeling of personal rootlessness, wherever you may be. A double feeling of belonging and of being a stranger which we can also find in the work of the artist Adrian Paci (Albania, 1969), when he reflects on the things that happen to Albanian migrants who make their way to Italy (or other countries) in search of social improvement. But their existences are always threatened by the uncertainty of survival and they often want to go back soon to their own town, so we might say that they are lives in transit, on return trips. For example, in his well-known video Centro di Permanenza Temporanea (Temporary Residence Centre), 2007, the title of which refers to the Italian detention camps for illegal immigrants, Paci shows a large group of dark-skinned individuals (as he takes good care to show us in closeups) wearing work clothes and walking in single file (some of the shots recall files of prisoners walking one behind the other), and they climb a metal staircase of the kind that is used for boarding planes. We see this group of workers (they are almost all men) waiting in full sunlight, with very serious attitudes and very attentive, anxious faces, on a runway where we can hear the sound of various aeroplanes. When the staircase is full and the workers stop moving, the viewer expects them to start entering the plane, which we suppose is out of camera shot. However, the surprise comes when we see in the next shot that there is no plane to board, that the workers are not going anywhere, they are just paralysed, because the staircase leads nowhere. They don’t board and they don’t go down again, they remain in limbo, while we see that other planes do land and take off, because life goes on around them. In parallel, in the series of photographs entitled Back Home, 2001, Paci focuses on his desire to delve into personal memory and emphasise the rootlessness of people who change their country, home and way of life but who continue to be profoundly linked to their history and their memories. Unlike what is done by many immigrants, who have themselves photographed in front of the most outstanding monuments in their new cities or beside the car that they have just bought, Adrian Paci turns the tables: he asked various Albanian families living in Milan for permission to photograph their homes in Albania, which he then used as background images in the photographs that he later took of the whole family in his studio, all together in front of a painted reproduction of their home in their native country. The contrast between the colour picture of the people in front of a painting (in grey or beige colours) that reproduces their home in their country of origin becomes a clear recollection of a past in which families used to have their photo taken in front of imagined or dreamed-of landscapes. It is a way of freezing time with austere images that become metaphors of an existence that is in constant movement but that often does not lead us anywhere. As with the other contemporary artists in Between Myth and Fright, the works of Taysir Batniji (Palestine, 1966) also draw inspiration from the geopolitical context that surrounds them, and from the everyday events and the many aspects of ordinary life that make up the artist’s own existence. Thus, without being strictly autobiographical works, her pictures are closely linked to her experiences in occupied Palestine, constantly enveloped in an atmosphere of war or violence, and to the consequences derived from that situation: displacement, exile and being uprooted from her own culture. “Since my arrival in France at the end of 1994,” she writes, “each trip back to Gaza raised a feeling of sadness and anguish in me, especially during the first days, as I noticed how much the situation had deteriorated during my absence. I felt frustrated and torn apart between my desire to stay and the wish to go away.” An anguish that she for now she has resolved by creating a disquieting work that evokes the conflicts that besiege her country. The series Watchtowers, 2008, comprises twenty-six black and white pictures that show twenty-six watchtowers that the Israeli army has built in the West Bank to monitor the Palestinian population. Strongly influenced by the work that Bernd and Hilla Becher did from the 1950s onwards to document the post-industrial heritage of Europe, Batniji has created this series to establish a typology of the “observation
Entre el mite i l'espant
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