Not Yet Anywhere | Installation | 2010
Building on a lecture-of-letters first presented at Manifesta Coffee Break, Take to the Sea expands a small exhibition room in a former abandoned post office into a performative space for speech acts. Here, across induced dislocations of distance and time, the speaker and the listener may not be together, but they are not alone.
Inscribed with instances when
the sea becomes a wall, a waiting room, a passage to a prison cell,
this project works through that which might emerge from the vicinity of
silence, to suggest an image for the invisible drawn out of voice.
Absence settles in the crevices between what is said and what is heard,
and sound, despite its complicity with language, urges an affect that
extends beyond the violent affirmation of words.
When the sea became a wall Credits
Texts: Anne Morrow Lindbergh Gift from the Sea 1991; Antonio Gramsci Lettere dal Carcere 1947; Charles Baudelaire "L'homme et la Mer", Fleurs du Mal 1857; Dulce Chacón La voz Dormida 2002; Fernand Braudel Les Mémoires de la Méditerranée: Préhistoire et Antiquité 1998; Iain Chambers, Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity 2008; Motaz Attala Mursi Abul Abbas – Abul Abbas al-Mursi 2010; Refiloe Lepere Letter from Refiloe 2010; Rito Letter from Rito 1942; Sonallah Ibrahim مذكرات الواحات Memoirs from the Oasis 2005
Performers: Brian Dabbs, Creston Whittington, Francesco Pisano, Itzea Goikolea Amiano, Jenna Krajeski, John Ehab, Lina Attalah, Louise Sarant, Motaz Attala, Refiloe Lepere
Sound Track: Alessandro Coronas
Surround Sound Design: Hussein Samy
Video Editors: Ahmed Adel, Mohamed Samir
Translators: Giovanni Sforza, Itzea Goikolea Amiano, Lina Attalah, Shaza Hassan Moharam
Acknowledgements: Al-Masry Al-Youm English Edition, Contemporary Image Collective, Mosekola Translation Services, Studio Wust el-Balad, Townhouse Gallery of contemporary art, Abe Mathibela, Ahmed al-Sawy, Ahmed Omar, Elizabeth Saito, Fahed Riachi, Hani Adel, Laura Mura, Lisa Kreutzer, Martino Lovato, Mauro Olivieri, Mia Jankowicz, Mohamed Abdallah, Mostafa el-Gamal, Shady el-Mashak, Shaimaa Yahia and Zasha Colah