La construction de la peur — Muntadas — Gabrielle Maubrie Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 9 → November 15, 2010

From 2003 to 2005 I was working in Tijuana and San Diego on a project I titled On Translation: Fear/Miedo. The work process made me think of the similarities with the area between southern Spain and northern Africa, for the latter represents ‘the door’ to Europe just as the former represents ‘the door’ to the USA.

While obtaining information and compiling data in the region of the Strait from the beginning of 2006 I have perceived a number of similarities but also great differences. Similarities in displacements, crossings, survival, the search for a better life, the idealisation of consumption, of the construction of what is often a media reality. Differences due, on the one hand, to the added complexity of religion and its influences, and on the other, to the problems caused by terrorism, all of which are examples of cultural tradition on either side of the Strait.

On Translation: Miedo/Jauf is undertaken as a personal construction that endeavours to speak of a specific reality and, at the same time, create a metaphor of the situations in which translation, interpretation, what is left unsaid and silence all form a part of the narrative.

Each individual project must come to terms with its specific context and with what is generated by that context; it should not give rise to a mechanistic production just because of the existence of similar situations and problems. This is one of the reasons why I cannot foretell the final length of the project.

September 2006

On Translation: Miedo/Jauf is a project on the experience and interpretation of fear and its complexities on either side of the Strait.

On Translation: Miedo/Jauf is not a work on African/European emigration/immigration. Nor is it a work on religion or on terrorism.

Two different realities separated not by the sea but by border fences and boundaries on both sides.

The search for the North, with its man-made paradises that for many remain lost; fear as an emotion/sensation inserted in the decision of crossing.

The construction of the South as a fiction/reality linked to phenomena of the unknown, exoticism and difference.

The attraction between two different realities in which information circulates from person to person via the media and through stereotypes.

An attempt to perceive and understand hope in a continent “forgotten” by the Western world; Africa as a hope for the future.

Teamwork and a choral interpretation.