"It is always summer somewhere"
About
« It is always summer somewhere » explores the double symbolic of the sea and proposes a contemporary mythology of exile.
To build this project, the artist went for two months in the Island of Lesbos in the summer 2018. Spending her days gazing at the boats with the locals in the port of Mytilene; watching the tourists bath on the eastern beaches facing the neighbor Turkey only few miles away; but also working with refugees in an NGO attached to the camp of Mauria ; she could not help but wonder how do so many antinomies can coexist within the same island: between the sea that brings me to new horizons but also the one that separates me of the other; the sea of pleasure of the tourists and the one of fears that bring refugees in search for a hopefully better future.
The project is built as a book with a prologue, a main text and an epilogue. Taking Aesop fable “The Shipwrecked Man and the Sea” as a starting point, it offers to write its own mythology of exile, immigration and relation with the Other, a mythology that goes far beyond the European refugee, drawing a parallel between the current situation and the one that happened in the same island in 1923 after the population exchange between Greece and Turkey that brought in Greece 1.2 million Greeks refugees expelled from Turkey.
« It is always summer somewhere » appropriates the imagery of summer farniente present in our western pop Culture - from the cheerful songs celebrating the seaside to the hyper saturated oneiric photos of beaches and summer activities we post on our social networks - and, using some irony, bring back inside this monolithic perception of the sea, elements that remind the view of the other realities this natural force carry in it.
Installation view
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