english text 187 I cross … therefore I exist Juan Guardiola Seifeddine Rezgui, an electrical engineering student at the University of Kairouan, landed on the Tunisian beach of Sosa at about 12 noon on 27 June 2015. The young man, aged 23, was wearing a T-shirt and Bermuda shorts and he was holding a sunshade, presenting a very Western appearance which did not give rise to suspicion. However, concealed inside the sunshade there was a Kalashnikov rifle, and shortly afterwards he started using it to shoot indiscriminately at Western tourists while at the same time avoiding Tunisian workers. This terrorist attack, responsibility for which was claimed the following day by Islamic State (ISIS), left a total of 38 people dead, most of them British. The news was reported in the media all over the world, and special emphasis was placed on the repercussion that the event would have on Tunisia’s tourist sector. Only a few months previously there had been another terrorist attack, in the Bardo Museum in the Tunisian capital (18 March 2015), and the two events presaged a gloomy future for a key sector of the country’s economy in view of the foreseeable cancellation of hotel bookings and consequent loss of jobs. It was striking that none of the newspapers and the news programmes that I consulted in Internet about this event reflected on the causes that could have led an educated, Westernised young Arab to carry out such a violent attack. Without wishing to justify an act that was an expression of fanaticism, I have to acknowledge that none of the reports commented on the reason for the radicalisation of this individual. Nor did they say anything about the living conditions of these young followers of the Islamic religion, or about the involvement and responsibility of Western countries for the crises that have developed in Libya, Palestine or Syria (to mention a few latent cases). Attention was not focused on “them” but on “us”, in other words, on how the incident would affect our Western and world economy. Tourism is a sector of the leisure market that is practised by Westerners under the attentive gaze of subordinate “others” (and with the help of their labour). We Europeans travel, without needing visas, to the beaches of north Africa (which are cheaper than Spanish, French, Italian or Greek destinations), flying in fast aeroplanes and staying in luxury hotels. We seek our pleasure in bronzed bodies, but that pleasure has been shattered. The violence of that event in Tunisia is not a cause but a reflection of the unequal exchange between Europeans and Africans. It is not new a problem; it has been with us for some time … and pictures of it, too. It is nearly twenty years since the artist Rogelio López Cuenca showed a representation of the conflict in a project called Marina / Seascape (1998). The picture in question is a juxtaposition of two photographs: the upper part shows the body of a dead immigrant on a beach; in the lower part we see a happy family swimming underwater in a swimming pool. The juxtaposition of these two images/ realities, accompanied by the discourse inherent in the language of journalistic and advertising photography, is a metaphor of the violence mentioned earlier. This picture is one of a set of postcards published as a contribution by the artist to a public art project, Arte en la calle (Art in the Street) curated by Adelaida Bravo in Adra (Almería). In addition to the postcards, the artist also presented a video installation in a shop window with three monitors and a text which included a fragment from the memoirs of a local anarchist militant, Antonio Vargas Rivas, describing the warm welcome that a group of refugees from the Spanish Civil War received in the port of Oran (Algeria). The content of the text contrasted with the video images, which showed the arrest of immigrants on the Andalusian coast. The project was completed by the organisation of a workshop of contemporary art in the towns of Adra and El Ejido, which focused on the theme of the “seascape” as a pictorial genre, a clear allusion to the “sea of plastic” that dominates the landscape in the area (it is also the title of a current television drama series, a detective story with a supposed denunciation of racism, set in an “imaginary” location with a system of agricultural cultivation in greenhouses).1 The problem of migration, and its representation, is a central feature of López Cuenca’s discourse, and he had already treated the theme with two stickers that he made for the exhibition Manifesta 1 in Rotterdam in 1996. One of the stickers, Euroflag, showed the European flag with the twelve stars (now out of date) imprinted on a bluetinted press photograph of a group of Albanian refugees trying to get from Yugoslavia to Italy. The other sticker, L’âme du voyage (The Soul of Travel), was a free version of a slogan of the Louis Vuitton company, a manufacturer of luxury goods, which showed a group of emigrants crowded together in a small boat. Thus the euphemism of the titles was questioned by contrasting them with images of violence, repression and death. Migration is treated in his work again in Voyage en Orient (Journey to the Orient), 2000, a video that forms part of a project, El Paraíso es de los extraños (Paradise Belongs to Strangers), in which the artist makes a critical, ironical reading of clichés associated with Oriental exoticism; and also in a later video, Canto VI, 2005, which takes its inspiration from a text by Héctor Zagal and Julián Etienne which points out that “in our century hospitality has been displaced by the hotel trade; when we come across the word in print, it always appears in the context of a range of products or services: a holiday package, the service provided by a hotel or the treatment given to us by a hostess. Hospitality has become merchandise, luxury merchandise …,”2 and in the process hospitality has been transformed into open hostility. The case of Seifeddine Rezgui and the work of Rogelio López Cuenca serve as an introduction for this essay, in which I wish to link a series of works made by artists who use the medium of video as a cognitive space for
Entre el mite i l'espant
To see the actual publication please follow the link above