“I am like one who wore his brick to show the world how was his home.”
Bertolt Brecht
Often I was asked this question: how do I see myself as an artist? My answer has always been the same: I consider myself an immigrant worker. My job is to consider what it is to be an artist, when he feels different from in his own cultural context, even in his own role.
With this necessity, this permanent need to think of exile, the project of the Exile Pavilion was born, as a traveling project, offering a parallel cartography, a free geography of temporary exhibitions, with stops in different countries.
The project raises the question of the exile as a new space to be reinvented, to be rethought and finally to be invested. He wants to question both the global and specific links between various forms of displacement, whether the migrant worker’s situation, the expatriate, the refugee or the exile of war, natural disasters, economical problems, and political or racial persecutions.The Exile Pavilion wants to invest and cross all boundaries, revisiting the experiences of the exile and reactivate the traces in history. Where does the exile begin and where does it end?
Are we all equal against the displacement and exile? And from who are we exiles?The Exile Pavilion does not exist as an architectural building even if the proposal is made for architects to imagine. But it is the works of artists, visual artists, musicians, poets, writers, performers they are exiles or their work deals with the displacement, which build together this protean and nomadic pavilion. Its journey will make layovers at artistic structures, institutions, ephemeral places, in the form of exhibitions, publications and meetings. At each stop, the works and archival materials are redesigned according to the place and its history.
mounir fatmi,
June 30, 2016
Studio Fatmi
mounir fatmi
http://www.mounirfatmi.com/
fatmi.mounir@studiofatmi.com
Assistante de projet
Laura Pandolfo
laura@studiofatmi.com
Website design
Untitled Agency
Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Laure Roynette, Paris.
Brankica Zilovic has been creating cloth cartographies for several years, stemming from a reflection on Pangaea: at the end of the Carboniferous era, over 300 million years ago, the Earth’s entire landmass formed one single supercontinent. Over the course of the follow- ing millions of years, Pangaea fractured, rifts formed and the surface of the land separated into continents. At the end of history, science predicts, in about 250 million years, an ultimate Pangaea will come to be, and all the continents will be united once again. Through globalization, both economically and in terms of communication and information networks, we are in a way already experiencing Pangaea. But paradoxically, this doesn’t lead to a pacific unification of the world, far from it. Instead, it creates the exacerbation of oppositions, ruptures and ideological, religious and economic rifts. Continents are more than ever adrift, simultaneously moving and torn by intestine wars. Brankica Zilovic delivers a certain vision of the world, both poetic and violent, where she highlights this world’s tensions, dislocations and at times brutal sutures, with its arbitrary borders, extorted peace agreements, dispossessed territories... Globalization only creates a “super fragile” supercontinent constantly at risk of disintegration and liquefaction. A world adrift.
Brankica Zilovic Born in Serbia. She lives and works in Paris. Brankica Zilovic, visual artist graduated from Beaux-Arts de Paris and teacher, is developing a work for which the thread appears repeatedly. Embroidery and the world of textiles have gradually become associated with his practices through installations, pictorial configurations or drawings. Particularly attentive to a biography that is both individual and collective, while remaining marked in particular by the context and the history of Serbia, she carries out memorial acts in which the relationship to accumulation, repetition and abnegation allow her to let rhizomatic configurations emerge. These sport an almost neuronal complexity that ultimately reflects the world of today.
Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Laure Roynette, Paris.