“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.
Today or any day that phone may ring and bring good news.
Ethel Waters
Press
Another 7 days to discover Mounir Fatmi's Pavilion of Exile in Tangier, Tanger Experience, August 8th, 2017.
Stella, Berger, From exile I made glasses to see, Dyptik, n°35, Oct-Nov 2016, pp. 36-38.
Contact
Studio Fatmi Paris Phone and Fax: +33 (0)9 52 78 14 92
mounir fatmi fatmi.mounir@studiofatmi.com
Project Assistant Laura Pandolfo laura@studiofatmi.com
This website was designed by Untitled Duo
Dania Reymond
GRENLAND UNREALISED
Video synthesis image
2013
Courtesy: The artist
A Bunun aborigine from Taiwan reads in his language passages of a scenario by Michelangelo Antonioni that was never filmed. The history of cinema, or rather its non-history, is filled with movies that were never made. One of these is Green Earth by Antonioni, which was printed as a book among the director’s unfilmed scenarios. The story tells the last days of a community living in an ideal and verdant Greenland that must flee the coming glaciation. The idea isn’t to shoot the director’s scenario but to showcase it as a virtual project via a virtual medium. It’s about creating a sort of archive that doesn’t deny the unfinished status of Antonioni’s project but on the contrary, reinforces and embraces it. This archive therefore doesn’t go against the catastrophic course of the story (the movie couldn’t be produced, the community must run or die). Instead, it hold at equal distance the disappearance and the non-occurred, the ruin and the utopia that are to me linked to the very nature of the medium.
About the artist
Born in Algiers in 1982, Dania Reymond lives and works between Paris and Angoulême. Dania Reymond graduated from the Beaux-Arts School of Marseille and Lyon, and from the Fresnoy National Studio of Contemporary Arts. Her films go from experimental videos to art-house fiction. In 2012, she directed Jeanne, her graduation film in the Fresnoy and received the Studiocollector Award. In 2014, her work received the Art Collector Award at the Young Creation Forum. In 2016, she di- rected Le Jardin d’essai, (The Trial Garden),Young Jury Award at the Brive Medium-Length Film Festival. Her films have been selected in festivals such as the FID of Marseille, Côté Court in Pantin or News directors News films, but also in places dedicated to contemporary art. In 2015, the CNAP (National Center for Contemporary Arts) integrates her works to its collection.