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Venue
Teloglion Foundation of Art / Thessaloniki French Institute / Museum of Byzantine Culture
Artist
Ursula Biemann-Armin Linke
 Artists's biography |
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The Maghreb Connection, installation, 2006 |
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The Maghreb Connection, installation, 2006 |
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THE MAGHREB CONNECTION
Movements of Life Across North Africa
”The Maghreb Connection” is an art and research project on the systems and modalities of migratory movements which constitute the Maghreb and Mediterranean area today. While media attention is devoted almost exclusively to the arrival of migrants on Europe's heavily guarded southern shores, this project explores the risky crossing of the Sahara, as well as the conditions of temporary or permanent residence for sub-Saharan migrants in the Maghreb countries of North Africa. The project opens up a field of connections among theoretical, aesthetic and activist concerns with regards to the multi-directional migration flows across North Africa. Highly adjustable, these movements have generated prolific operational networks, systems of information and social organization among fellow migrants as well as interaction with local populations. They frequently intersect with other forms of organized mobility such as tourism, martial formations of official military and rebel groups, the punctual appearance of humanitarian personnel and, not least, writers, journalists and image-makers like ourselves, who strive to make sense of it all. The conjunction of these movements generates synergies, conflicts and sometimes surprising alliances.The exhibition and the publication are a collaborative quest to invent a visual geography, deeply informed by social science and at grips with actuality, but using the tools of art and presented on the museum circuit. The process of research unfolded over the course of two years, not as a tightly concerted effort but rather among a loose network whose exchanges were sparked by a number of meetings on both sides of the Mediterranean. This network includes Maghrebi scholars who research in France, Spanish activists who live in Morocco or take action across the Strait of Gibraltar, European artists doing fieldwork in the Maghreb and Sahel, video artists from Cairo working on immigration from China or emigration to Italy. The project was conceived for and exhibited at The Townhouse Gallery in Cairo in December 2006.
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