The Sea Within The Continent
June 19, 2018 5:16 PM   Subscribe

At this year's Berlin Biennale, titled "We Don't Need Another Hero, artist Heba Y. Amin (previously) presents OPERATION SUNKEN SEA, a utopian plan promising that "...A new era of human progress will be initiated through the draining and rerouting of the Mediterranean Sea to converge Africa and Europe into one supercontinent."

From an Aljazeera review of the Biennale: Her grandiloquent, utopian speech sounds totally bonkers, and may possibly come across as a tasteless joke to those who are not well versed in the history of the region. But the script of her speech meshes together actual texts of speeches made by eight dictators and megalomaniacs from the past and the present

An Artforum Article, in Heba Y. Amin's own words:

"I became really fascinated by these ownership claims to the Mediterranean Sea, which carries so many histories and belongs to so many cultures. Who were these megalomaniacal men who felt that it was theirs to control? Where does that entitlement come from, and what does it feel like? I thought it’d be interesting to replicate that viewpoint, but from the other side. What would happen if these projects were proposed by an African Arab woman who used the exact same logic and the same constructs—how would that read?"

Heba Y. Amin's Twitter Profile
posted by nikaspark (3 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is my kind of high-concept concept art. Cool post, I had not been tracking the Biennale this year!
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 7:59 PM on June 19, 2018 [3 favorites]


The spirit of Borges' Pierre Menard lives on. What a lovely idea.
posted by McCoy Pauley at 7:38 AM on June 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


This sounds like an amazing project. I liked this part from the Art Forum article, too: "Many of these old manuscripts illustrated the sea as a positive space and everything around it as negative. It was wonderful to discover this reversal. It also speaks so well to why so many artists in the Middle East have research-based practices. We suddenly have access to many archives we couldn’t access before, and we can now investigate our own histories and do our own anthropological studies. For those of us who have been colonized, I believe this is how we break the stronghold—by rewriting history."
posted by mixedmetaphors at 4:10 PM on June 20, 2018


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