The Mediterranean: A Round Sea

The Mediterranean Sea is round; so is the skirt of a whirling dervish, the repeated gyration of a flamenco dancer’s wrist, the shape of a traditional Greek dance, a fruit basket in a street market, a lifeboat in the middle of the sea (the flip side of convivencia). So are the sun and the moon. Everything that exists in the cosmos operates in circular motions and patterns. A circle has no baseline. It has no right or left, bottom or top. It rolls. What goes around comes around.
It may be, then, that there is an urgent need once again for a more spherical awareness of this very particular region with its mobile and unstable geography and its gravitational pull. What does the “Mediterranean” mean for people who inhabit its shores and islands and cross its surface? How can we bring the past into the present and how can a “parallel” future become plausible within our lives? Can we arrive at the formation of new/old vocabularies that encompass risk but also promise new forms of solidarity and interconnectedness, beyond normative and hegemonic narratives? How can we celebrate diversities in unity, while managing to escape the subjective and sometimes dominating viewpoint of the “author” that brings various constituencies together? Downside up and sideways networks are what this “little” book (and the exhibition from which it stems) are aiming to mobilise in a bid to instigate a meeting point for shared intensities.
Marina Fokidis The volume, edited by Marina Fokidis and conceived on the occasion of the 42nd edition of ARCOmadrid, collects texts by Etel Adnan, Marina Fokidis, Bouchra Khalili, Hila Peleg, Pedro G. Romero, as well as artworks by Letizia Battaglia, Semiha Berksoy, Anna Boghiguian, M’barek Bouhchichi, Mohamed Bourouissa, Silvina Der Meguerditchian, Saafa Erruas, Laia Estruch, Nilba Gures, Iman Issa, Sanja Ivekovic, Pauline Jardin Curnier, Jannis Kounellis, Maria Lai, Sigalit Landau, Huda Lufti, Jumana Manna, Hana Miletic, Asuncion Molinos Gordo, Movement Radio,