Together with researcher Vincent Marquis I created and curated FLOTS: a poetic and philosophical reflection on the theme of migration and identity, for the exhibition Going Somewhere at Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik ZK/U. This exhibition project took place from June 3-5 2016, at ZK/U, in Moabit, Berlin in relation to the Ortstermin festival 2016; Flucht und Identität.
Going Somewhere emphasized the idea that every movement — individual, social, artistic, migratory, political, philosophical — has an end, a goal, a destination. More specifically, this exhibition underlined the notion that that destination is naturally tied to the identity of the body (individual, collective, political) that aims at it. In other words, the choices we make as we go along our personal or collective paths necessarily influence and determine the person or collectivity we then become. The exhibition intended to act as a stopping point where visitors can ponder over those choices.
FLOTS took the form of small pamphlets and a projection within the spaces of the ZK/U. It highlights questions that emerge when we begin to think about these concepts, especially in our current sociopolitical context where we are bombarded with images of migration and displacement.
Statement
In French, the word ‘flot’ refers to several things. In its most literal sense, the word refers to waves, as in ‘les flots de la mer’, ‘the waves of the sea’. Figuratively, the word also evokes torrents, streams or mass movements -- of objects, information, people, etc. Aquatic metaphors like this one are in fact often utilized in the latter sense to refer to movements of migration and the arrival of refugees -- often acting as a rhetorical device implying that such movements can be dammed, prevented, stopped. Encapsulated in ‘flot’ is therefore not only the tangible entity of the wave, but also the idea of that wave’s movement across time and space.
Flots ponders over this multifaceted definition and the changing identity of what travels, transits, migrates. While artists and scholars alike have often attended to the way in which space and our material environment shape us, the effect on the mind and the body of the journeys between those spaces is more enigmatic. How do different terms related to movement -- transit, journey, travel, migration -- induce different responses and nuances across contexts and cultures? What are the effects of each on the mind and the body of the traveler? In what specific way do each of those movements change the individual? Rather than adding to the bombardment of images we are currently experiencing, Flots explores ways of making sense of migration and identity in the form of short questions or instructions that visitors can take with them, like waves traveling to a yet unknown shore...