ADRIFT AND EXPOSED

Resum

Not to search for the reason of Isaac Julien’s Western Union: Small Boats (2007), but rather to reason with the work, to speak in its vicinity: what follows is the log of one possible route. The trauma of modern-day migration, here most obviously deepened and dramatised by the dangers of crossing vast and inhospitable spaces – the Sahara and the Mediterranean Sea – is also the trauma of that split in the unified image of the world that seemingly reflects and respects only our concerns. Subsequent fragmentation disseminates the insistence of possible and impossible transits and translations in which the refused, the expelled and the marginalised dissect and multiple the horizon.  These are shards of history that are also parts of us. The narrative unwinds, confused by rhythms, tonalities and accents that befuddle the desire for a secure semantics and the reconfirmation of our world, of our possession of the account.