Neither on Land nor at Sea
–
Meeting by the Mediterranean Im/Possible
Things and places
that have left no trace
visible to the eye,
creatures that don’t exist
on land or at sea
you remember
–Ahmed Morsi [1]
The 2022/24 season of UNIDEE Residency
Modules takes form around an overarching non-theme: the Mediterranean.
Sea, region, adjective, border, weapon,
destiny, Mediterranean holds as many meanings as there are voices uttering the
word. The Mediterranean is the geo-historical region where the European
colonial project originated, the contemporary space where it continues to renew
its methodologies and to fuel its aspirations. The Mediterranean claimed by
Europe, the Euro-Mediterranean, is a militarised borderland, an unachievable
horizon, for scholar Hakim Abderrezak, a ‘seametery’.[2] It is also what Edward Said would name an imaginative geography, a
north-to-south oriented system of representation, carved out of European
nations’ desires for identitarian ownership of the sea. The Mediterranean is a
political project, a reified trope, a choice made in pursuit of a goal.[3]
In the past twenty years,
Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto has been engaged in activities that
variously reasoned on the Mediterranean as either subject matter or operational
ground.[4] Moved by the conviction that the Mediterranean offered special conditions to
intervene on the mandate – shared by the institution with its founder
Michelangelo Pistoletto – to enhance the role of art as an agent of
socio-political change, the project Love Difference [5] utilised a regional framing to organise gatherings of professionals and
organisations, with the scope to promote inter-Mediterranean cooperation in the
arts and beyond. At the basis of the undertaking lied a specific interpretation
of the Mediterranean as single geography, and a tacit acknowledgment of the
ability of geographical conceptualisation to function as a productive tool.
Unsettling this existing
institutional approach, the residency programme Neither on Land nor at Sea names the Mediterranean that informs its curatorial arguments a non-theme.
The wording stemming from the belief that resisting un-problematic thematisation
of the Mediterranean is to reject the consolatory ease of the figurative value,
of the usable representation. This is an invitation to rather linger in the
uncomfortability of restless negotiation, of positionalities and perspectives. During the moments of
aggregation offered by the residency formats, we will move through shared
conversations and actions, exchanged knowledges and understandings, with the
goal to trouble the singular imagination of the Mediterranean, and so to
attempt making spaces of possibility out of unresolved and unresolvable
territories. We will stay with a Mediterranean
plural, which cannot be found in the exclusionary rhetoric of the natural
inclination toward painless hybridity preached by northern shores. We will
encounter opaque and ever-adjusting geographies, which do not reside in
landscapes of approximation that flirt with the argument of Mediterranean unity
as result of a ‘very special climate similar from one end to the other of
the sea, which amalgamates landscapes and ways of life’.[6] Indeed, far from the environmental determinism participating in the thought of
the best-known historian of the European Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel, we
will be made to remember, with Arjun Appadurai, that ‘histories produce
geographies and not vice versa’.[7] And this working of time on space is never completed as, with Katherine
McKittrick, geography is the result of society’s construction of space, and concealment,
marginalisation, boundaries all are always-renovating social processes.[8]
In early November 2022, when the curatorial work leading to the
development of this new residencies’ season had just begun, we had the
opportunity to welcome to Biella a small group of practitioners –curators,
artists, researchers, facilitators– from art institutions and projects active
in the broader Mediterranean region.[9] In the course of the few days spent together
we intertwined images and words, in a continuous storytelling that spoke of
ambitions and shortcomings. We described locality as a mandate and as a methodology.
We talked about friction as a necessity, infrastructures as content. We weighed
up the disparity in the means and resources available to each of us, we
compared modes of (para-)instituting. We discussed the illusion of the
postcolonial, erasure and resistance. And we debated ways of being – or not –
in/with a regional geography some of us may have felt called to manifest.
This first event, which anticipated a project yet to be written, seemed to
crack some of its codes with unexpected precision. Venturing into tales of many
Mediterraneans, while choreographing the temporary cartography of hospitality,
fostered a double orientation, in which the position of the host and the guest
were constantly rearranged. Can the act of evoking/making geographies in a
malleable terrain of encounter allow for the unlocking of new ‘caveats of care’[10] in arts’ production, curation, and fruition, which may better adapt to the
ever-changing needs of contemporary spaces and times?
This is a call to meander around unreducible
complications and on shifting grounds, to explore ways in which geography is
historically, socially, and politically produced, to dig up and talk about the
mental images we carry with us,[11] which create space and, with it, its contrasting meanings. In the framework of
the expansive working process that will unfold in the next two years, the
Mediterranean will be treated as an opportunity to think of our present times
geographically, across intertwined histories and overlapping territories,[12] via the exploration of some of the experiences and imaginations that inhabit
and traverse them. The project pluralises Mediterranean concepts/spaces as
sites of worldmaking and experimentation in communal living. To do so, it
adopts un-grounded geographies and colliding historicities not as objects of
analysis, but as meeting places, in which to congregate to elaborate on the
role played by situated practices and shared processes in the promotion of
social transformations, towards epistemic justice.
.