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The Canary Islands are constantly on the news these days with reports of the continuous illegal, escorted and/or expected arrival of pateras, cayuco boats and canoes to its shores. These small boats—arriving crammed with Africans from the continent, mainly from the neighbouring and closest countries (Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, Cape Verde) but also from distant nations in the heart of Africa—are entirely inadequate for the service to which they are put by mafia groups operating with impunity in the area. The passengers they carry, who have invested their entire life savings or indebted themselves up to the eyeballs, make the trip with the noble aim of finding work in “paradise” or an apparent “better life." |
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Vertical Sea – Antonio Zaya
The Canary Islands are constantly on the news these days with reports of the continuous illegal, escorted and/or expected arrival of pateras, cayuco boats and canoes to its shores. These small boats—arriving crammed with Africans from the continent, mainly from the neighbouring and closest countries (Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, Cape Verde) but also from distant nations in the heart of Africa—are entirely inadequate for the service to which they are put by mafia groups operating with impunity in the area. The passengers they carry, who have invested their entire life savings or indebted themselves up to the eyeballs, make the trip with the noble aim of finding work in “paradise” or an apparent “better life.” Yet some find quite the opposite as the dramatic crossing unfolds or at journey’s end (apt words indeed) on beaches where European tourists relax and enjoy the sun and a decent life to which they too aspire and rightly so.
As this is our geographical area’s most relevant tragic, everyday and real landscape the first Biennial of the Canaries organised by the Canary Island government and directed by Rosina Gómez-Baeza, cannot and—obviously—does not want to turn a blind eye to it, precisely because this Biennial was conceived of and features that same notion of landscape as a human concept. The underlying aim then is to reflect on the problems arising from the fragmented nature of our archipelago and to channel communication between the different elements that form it.
In this respect, the main theme in discourse at the Biennial is territorial fragmentation and movement, which virtually implies overcoming insularity. This is then tied in with actual urban landscape, the consequence of unsustainable demographic and tourist pressures and discussions on resistance and approach of contemporary art to globalization.
This desire to attach importance to the tragic relationship between Europe and Africa, historically misrepresented, is certainly coherent with our historical memory, with the recent and past link the Canary Islands have had and have with America as the main destination of Canarian emigrants and founders up to the middle of the 20th century. Like today’s African immigrants they landed on the shores of America (Venezuela and the Caribbean, mainly) in the same "unlawful" manner, in the same numbers, under the same insalubrious conditions and at the same risk to their lives to improve the deplorable conditions from whence they came as happens in so many other places throughout the world (the Mexican border, south east Asia, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, Central Europe et cetera).
If we add the significant European presence (currently through tourism and in the past through the sugar industry and other scarce agricultural resources) to these two past and present realities that link us so closely to Africa and America we get a somewhat approximate and simplified idea of the cultural and historical landscape with which the Canarian archipelago has struggled and grown since the time of the Conquest at the end of the 15th century—it has been fully dependent on Europe since then.
This discourse also returns to the landscape that predates our European history, with some artistic interventions situated in areas adjoining pre-Hispanic sites of lybic-bereber origin a remnant of the ancient settlers in the Canary Islands and an example of exceptional archaeological heritage.
Despite the aforementioned economic dependence the Canary Islands have on mass tourism from Europe, given the earlier observations it seems obvious and fitting that the Symposium of this first Biennial should focus its attention on the Maghreb, the Sub-Saharan area and on Latin-America, without excluding Europe as this is the cultural area to which we belong and it has played a dominant role in our development and in our recent history.
In any case, it is neither our intention to minimise our pre-Hispanic geographical and cultural link with the ancient Tamazgha (now Maghreb) nor obviate our traditional relationship with the Americas where the Canary Islanders founded cities (Montevideo/Uruguay, Sao Paulo/Brazil, San Antonio/USA, to name but a few) and where their presence can still be felt (Caracas, still known as the "eighth island" is a good example).
This complex, poly-cultural landscape is inextricably woven with the insular and fragmented nature of our land and with our strategic geographic location in the North Atlantic facing the Saharan shores.
Nevertheless, to establish sustainable dialogue with these other Atlantic shores, which is our expressed intention, it seems absolutely essential that we give the first word to those we normally silence at a time when we need to go beyond the topics of insult and disgrace that still find a place in the debased discussions of those that call themselves "civilized" as they continue to display their explicit ignorance, morbidity and inhumanity alongside their evident fraudulence.
In this sense, we have extended invitations to figures of renowned cultural prestige to discuss the problems arising or implicit here and these include Abdelwahab Medded (Tunisia,) Bassam El-Baroni (Egypt) for Maghreb; Salah Hassan (Sudan,) Hannah Le Roux (South Africa) for Sub-Saharan Africa; Angel Kalemberg (Uruguay,) José Roca (Colombia) for Latin-American and Remo Guidieri (Italy) for Europe. The specific intention here is to open up for discussion those sensitive and unavoidable issues bespoken by this unsustainable global landscape which should be brought to light due to the influence they have on what we now call cultural "reality" and on the environment and on human rights more than half a century after Auschwitz . In this respect, the pathetic oversight of the "accumulated suffering" to which T.W. Adorno referred in his famous "Aesthetic Theory," has of course lots to do with this global market that openly confuses value and price, ethics and aesthetics and applies criteria that favours immediate gain, where indifference and cruelty, dogma and lies have become the emperors of this new era of amnesia.
But it is not our intention to state the obvious, but to show our resistance to the complicity in silence that means death, as ACT-UP said half a century ago during the AIDS crisis.
The African (Allan deSouza; Hala Elkoussy and Otobong Nkanga) and Latin-American (Fabiana de Barros and Cecilia Paredes) artists I have chosen to illustrate this first approach to a discussion on silence—also invited to exchange ideas with us in this First Biennial of the Canaries—work from New York, Cairo, Geneva, Philadelphia and Paris and from any other place in the World where "no human being is illegal," as the poster by the Spanish artist Rogelio López Cuenca reads but where even the sea has become a barrier to communication, as is shown in a recent video by Sergio Brito—a Canarian artist originally from Venezuela.
