Exile Pavilion / Layover 1

“I am like one who wore his brick to show the world how was his home.”

Bertolt Brecht Often I was asked this question: how do I see myself as an artist? My answer has always been the same: I consider myself an immigrant worker. My job is to consider what it is to be an artist, when he feels different from in his own cultural context, even in his own role.

With this necessity, this permanent need to think of exile, the project of the Exile Pavilion was born as a traveling project, offering a parallel cartography, a free geography of temporary exhibitions, with stops in different countries. The project raises the question of exile as a new space to be reinvented, to be rethought and finally to be invested. It wants to question both the global and specific links between various forms of displacement, whether the migrant worker’s situation, the expatriate, the refugee or the exile of war, natural disasters, economic problems, and political or racial persecutions.

The Exile Pavilion wants to invest and cross all boundaries, revisiting the experiences of the exile and reactivate the traces in history. Where does exile begin and where does it end? Are we all equal against displacement and exile? And from who are we exiles?

The Exile Pavilion does not exist as an architectural building even if the proposal is made for architects to imagine. But it is the work of visual artists, musicians, poets, writers, and performers who are exiles or whose work deals with displacement, which build together this protean and nomadic pavilion. Its journey will make layovers in artistic venues, institutions, ephemeral places, in the form of exhibitions, publications and meetings. At each stop, the work and archival materials are redesigned according to the place and its history.

The Exile Pavilion will make ​​its first stop in the French National Archives Museum in Paris, a city that was home to some of the leading avant-garde artists of the twentieth century during a time in which exile led to lasting artistic changes and developments. In the current issues of identity and migration, it is important to highlight the depth of artwork and creativity produced during this movement. If exile is a chance, then is to return a fantasy? This first layover of Exile Pavilion proposes to confront this idea directly and will feature several leading contemporary artists who explore this issue in their work.

The exhibition will offer a range of work and artistic interventions set throughout the antechamber and in the windows of the National Archives Museum and will include a special video program in the projection room.

mounir fatmi, June 30, 2016