{"id":63872,"date":"2025-02-10T07:30:08","date_gmt":"2025-02-10T06:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/a-desk.org\/?p=63872"},"modified":"2025-02-03T12:17:52","modified_gmt":"2025-02-03T11:17:52","slug":"europes-southern-border","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/a-desk.org\/en\/magazine\/europes-southern-border\/","title":{"rendered":"Europe\u2019s Southern Border"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently, within the collective exhibition <\/span>N\u00facleo Contempor\u00e1neo<\/span><\/i> (Contemporary Nucleus) curated by Adriano Pedrosa for the 60th edition of the Biennale di Venezia (2024), a large-scale embroidered tapestry made by Bouchra Khalili (Morocco, 1975) was on view. In <\/span>Sea-Drifts<\/span><\/i> (2024), the French-Moroccan artist undertakes a complex investigation into migratory routes, specifically those that link North and West Africa with the Canary Islands. Khalili uses the tapestry, dyed with natural indigo, as a strategy to document the trade routes of the 16th century. In the process, the artist subverts and redefines the traditional function and concept of the map and, in the process, the notions of territory and border.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bouchra Khalili, in order to make visible the experiences of Africans who embark on one of the deadliest migration routes in the world, immerses the viewer within a diffuse, liquid border crisscrossed by a tangle of white lines that connect archipelago and continent. Despite the fact that the artist uses only this element, the force of this indigo blue represents both a slap and a seduction, causing the public to feel like a participant. The same shade of blue also floods a large canvas entitled <\/span>Poema del Atl\u00e1ntico<\/span><\/i>. <\/span>La noche<\/span><\/i> (Atlantic Poem: The Night, 1918-1919) by N\u00e9stor de la Torre (Canary Islands, Spain, 1887-1938), a key work and artist in the history of art from the Canary Islands. <\/span>Poema del Atl\u00e1ntico. La noche<\/span><\/i> was conceived as an exaltation of nature in which the mystery, violence and vastness of the ocean are explored under the light of the moon.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This composition reveals two disproportionately sharp-toothed moray eels, as if they were sea monsters, that are born in and are (con)founded with the sea. It is a sublime scene complemented by the figure of two children, one of whom, with a ghostly face, is about to be devoured and the other, whose face exudes fear and exhaustion, rides on the back of one of the moray eels in an attempt to save his life. Poem of the Atlantic: The Night might go unnoticed if it were not for the fact that the artist proposes the binomial death\/Atlantic and because the figure fighting for his life has Afro features, the first known presence of a racialized character in a painting produced in the Canary Islands. This arrangement of elements is not a coincidence. After all, N\u00e9stor de la Torre lived for years in Paris and it would not be unreasonable to think that he came across a work completed exactly a century earlier and later acquired by the Louvre, that is, The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819) by Th\u00e9odore G\u00e9ricault. Without forgetting that the Frenchman\u2019s scene takes place on the coast of West Africa, very close to the Canary Islands, both paintings share the same rough sea, the bodies floating on the sea and a pyramidal composition containing racialized people.<\/span><\/p>\n

The prominent inclusion of a black man (understood in both works to be African) constitutes an aesthetic and political gesture, embodying a powerful symbolic charge that transcends the limits of the historical narrative represented. This represents an act of disruption<\/span>[1]<\/sup><\/a> Engler, M. y Engler, P.: Manual de desobediencia civil<\/i>. Icaria Editorial. Barcelona, 2022, p 185.<\/span><\/span>