Fixing the Archipelago,

Research program

"Somewhere among the notebooks of Gideon I once found a list of diseases as yet unclassified by medical science, and among these there occurred the word islomania, which was described as a rare but by no means unknown affliction of spirit. These are people, Gideon used to say, by way of explanation, who find islands somehow irresistible. We islomanes, says Gideon, are the direct descendants of the Atlanteans, and it is toward the lost Atlantis that our subconscious is drawn. This means that we find islands irresistible."¹ Lawrence Durrell

 

During the Social Contract research centre exhibition held at ISBA in Besançon in February 2019, the team wanted to exhibit Richard Baquié's 1994 work "FIXER" (to set). At the time of hanging, this work proved to be essential and central, in front of the gallery's entrance door. It evoked another elsewhere, setting a new horizon, leaving, drifting off to find Ithaca, like Ulysses and setting an image in our memories and on paper. From Marseille, this work sets the horizon, yet an islet obstructs the Mediterranean sea; the Frioul islands. The archipelago awaits us.

"Between Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and other parts of the world, there is no doubt that the archipelago, any archipelago, any island of any archipelago, today reflects one of the dominant expressions of a nationalist project which, faced with the reductive aspirations of certain political regimes, sets as benchmark the global scale and the infinitely plural. The metaphor goes further. The archipelago moves the imagination further afield. Like a spirit, it blows wherever it wants."²  
Bertrand Westphal

 The term "archipelago" comes from the Byzantine Greek (archipelagos), and means "main sea" in reference to the Aegean Sea, while "Mediterranean" means "sea in the middle of the land", in Latin "mare medi terra". Fixer in French refers as much to the way of looking (to stare), as to positioning oneself, as to the way of setting an image on paper.


"Borders are omnipresent in the time and space of the Mediterranean. However, I propose that we refrain from praising it. Régis Debray has chosen to do so. To justify his choice, he said: "Happiness is in the meadow, but not in the wasteland". Régis Debray doesn't like wastelands. But this wasteland could well be the ideal territory for a geographical illusion that would be the other name of utopia. As far as I am concerned, I am worried about the consequences of this eulogy. I prefer, by far, to consider a wasteland open to movement and a remnant of hope than a green meadow closed to outsiders, and closed in to insiders . The rich part of Europe is not intended to become a walled garden whose administrative or, who knows, material walls would rise along the northern coasts of the Mediterranean sea. However, this risk is high. The example of the hideous walls that separate southwestern United States from Mexico is present in the minds of many Mediterranean people.”³ Bertrand Westphal


Since it is impossible to define all the borders of the Mediterranean area, it is proposed to focus on its centre: the archipelago, which is too often considered to be peripheral. With the exception of two islands that have struggled to gain independence, Cyprus and Malta, all have become peripheral zones of continental power with the advent of Nation States: Corsica governed by Paris, the Balearics by Madrid, Crete by Athens, the Princes' Islands by Ankara, Brijuni by Zagreb and Sicily by Rome. This dependence of these island territories on mainlanders, sometimes very distant, has often impoverished them culturally and denied their similarities rather than promoted their links. It is often necessary to travel through a continental capital to get from island to island. « Its boundaries are drawn in neither space nor time. There is in fact no way of drawing them: they are neither ethnic nor historical , state nor national; they are like a chalk circle that is constantly traced and erased, that the winds and waves, that obligations and inspirations expand or reduce. »⁴ Predrag Matvejevitch


Corsica and Sardinia seem to have seceded from France and Spain by drifting inexorably towards Italy to position themselves in the Bay of Genoa, but French is still spoken in Corsica and Catalan on the west coast of Sardinia. Malta and Sicily have also drifted towards Italy, but from Africa, they still have in memory their Berber and Arab cultures.


“They say neither Romans nor Phoenicians, Greeks nor Arabs ever subdued Sardinia. It lies outside; outside the circuit of civilisation ... But it still reminds me of Malta: lost between Europe and Africa and belonging to nowhere. Belonging to nowhere, never having belonged to anywhere. To Spain and the Arabs and the Phoenicians most. But as if it had never really had a fate. No fate. Left outside of time and history.”⁵ D. H. Lawrence


The Mediterranean islands as metaphors of elsewhere and sources of several myths. The island civilizations of the Mediterranean being often of mixed cultures, they are for the most part made up of influences from the three continents bordering the Mediterranean. Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome had a constitutive and shared influence by the people of the Mediterranean archipelago. We will question the contemporary island resurgences of protochronism and thus recall the concept of Racine rhizome, dear to Edouard Glissant, but also think of indigenous people potentially as sedentary migrants.


Mediterranean sea : « The amniotic fluid of humanity and the cradle of civilisation »⁶ Claudio Magris


This tiny body of water populated by a few islands, themselves populated by some twelve million inhabitants speaking at least ten languages, will be our research ground and will allow various points of anchorage and peregrinations. We view the archipelago as a process of deterritorialization of a set of relationships that allows their actualisation in other contexts.


“Whenever a doctrine comes in contact with the Mediterranean basin, the Mediterranean has emerged intact from the resulting clash of ideas, the country has dominated the doctrine”⁷ Albert Camus,


The written word as the essential source and salt of the Mediterranean sea. This cultural space is one of the great cradles of civilizations. Many of the fundamental texts and great myths that may have had a global influence were born in or near the Mediterranean sea: the Odyssey, the Torah, the New Testament, the Talmud, the Koran, the Social Contract... Based on concepts of serendipity / extension / geopoetics / displacement of the horizon line / drift / elsewhere / civil disobedience / voluntary simplicity, the Mediterranean archipelago will be explored in its symbolic and historical dimension. To think of the world from this transnational physical archipelago, from the island as a territory of the environment, to look at the world from the sea. Speaking from the sea, staring from the land.


“Islands can be abodes of calm and serenity, contrition and expiation (which is why they accommodate so many monasteries, prisons and asylums).”⁸ Predrag Matvejevitch


 In order to approach each of the chosen island territories, we suggest an open methodology, one that would make serendipity, dear to Kenneth White, its shape or even drift, dear to Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Different moments of drift and exploration from these places allow us to develop a corpus of films, photographs, drawings, texts... which will be gathered in a collective work. To ignore the political boundaries of this local territory in order to address it in its supranational specificities and to bring out the possible links and essences of these various emerged lands. 


Philippe Terrier-Hermann