Mare Nostrum by Lily Abichahine
Opening Friday, November 6 at 6pm
Lily quotes a fisherman in one of her notes on Mare Nostrum: “the Mediterranean Sea travels.” This idea has become a structuring principle of the project. Water circulates without borders or passports, connecting places where she has lived and worked as an artist-in-residence: Marseille, İzmir, Palermo and, invariably, her native Beirut. As it moves, it carries traces, histories and ongoing transformations with it.
The sea thus appears as a fundamentally unstable space, eluding the political divisions that attempt to fix and delineate it. If water is the same substance circulating throughout this basin, moving freely and eventually returning to its point of departure, according to what criteria can we distinguish one body of water from another?
As Abichahine explains: “From a legal point of view, land has always had a hierarchy over water.” Yet she questions this very hierarchy. At a time when contemporary art has increasingly turned towards questions of water, she asks: “What if our prism of vision and priority shifts to the legalities of water? What if the space of this Mediterranean water prevails as one, united and whole, rather than in accordance with the land and its divisions?”
This is how Abichahine dives into a world defined by waves of mythology and shores of political dimensions. Interested in the way mythology once functioned as a legal and moral order, as a form of rule before the existence of formal legal systems, she explores geographies of power through history, poetry and the body.
Abichahine uses myths not simply as metaphors for contemporary struggles, but as living structures through which histories, territories and systems of power can be revisited. Connecting cities and myths with the contemporary reality of the Mediterranean Sea, Mare Nostrum poetically traces the flux and reflux of a fluid reality in which ecologies, histories and politics continually meet, overlap and transform one another.