Figurative Essays on Postcolonialism | 2011

mixed media on the mechanic pedestal, 160x300x100 cm

What are the signs that we have been able to put on Amin Maalouf’s “Ports of Call,” that feels unfinished? And now, how should we start to produce this ominous geography that different sets of eyes wake up to every day? What are the signs that should be used? Put more simply, for those of inside, with which signs does the Middle East start and end? If cyclical, how is the absolute transpired? Over which signifiers are the layers of perception between the two centers of memory founded? In other words, do we have such a prescription? Every passing day, more so, no.

Maybe, when returning to the ports with very different tools, that very lost image in our minds that fails to appear, is about the beginning and end of those very ports. This new “cultural game” that we learned to play with post-colonialism is tamed so that we are not reminded of a hundred years ago, but, it is just as obese, sovereign, voyeuristic and equally mad when in trouble. We should be careful. To seek refuge in similar ports from autonomous lands that lean on forests of cedar, to go on a sea journey that ends on the peripheries of Paris, to dictate the same cultures, to escape the same cultures, to remember the same culture as “mine,” is more difficult today than ever before.

Now, trying to look at myself after having returned from the same point, it should be added that this is not an East-West dialectic. At least, it is not about directions that appear in my mind at the most dreary moment when I’m by the cultural debris. I’m just trying to seek ways of confessing the search for signifiers that are about me and delineated by me. I’m researching myself. Sometimes, I find.