I am excited to announce that I was commissioned by the Tunisian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2017 to create a piece of work on the theme of migration.
At this year’s 57th Art Biennale in Venice, Tunisia will exhibit “The Absence of Paths”, its first pavilion since 1958. They chose to forgo the closed-off pavilions of Venice in favour of an interactive, performative exhibit. A series of immigration offices staffed by North African migrants will be set up along the outskirts of the Biennale. They will be handing out securitised documents meant to symbolically allow entry into a speculative, borderless world. These offices, which utilise the cold mechanics of bureaucracy to imagine a world with freedom of movement, will serve as a humorous way to spark a participatory debate on the absurdity of contemporary migration.
Along side these ‘immigration offices’, the curator Lina Lazaar created a beautiful online platform that brought together work from all over the world exploring migration – photographs, stories, films, recipes and tweets.
They had a very tight turn around and I decided to pick up on a thought I’d been having about how, no matter or glorified mode of transport, in the end it is our bodies, our feet that take us everywhere. I decided to make a short, repeating silent film.