The Space of a Metaphor: On Mediterraneanism in the Event-Institution

A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry PAGE 125 AFTERALL Francesco Lojacono, Veduta di Palermo, in Palermo Atlas, Manifesta 12 Palermo, 2018. Courtesy OMA A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry THE SPACE OF A METAPHOR: ON MEDITERRANEANISM IN THE EVENTINSTITUTION Chiara Cartuccia Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings. – Edward Said1 AFTERALL PAGE 126 Inaugurated by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, the first edition of Alexandria Biennale for Mediterranean Countries opened its doors on 26 July 1955. The exhibition was promoted as a celebratory event honouring the third anniversary of the 1952 Egyptian Revolution, and featured an impressive range of 265 artists from Egypt, France, Greece, Italy, Lebanon, Spain, Syria and the former Yugoslavia. While following a structure of national participation modelled after the Venice Biennale, the Alexandria Biennale was the first among similar large-scale events to adopt an explicitly regional frame focussed on the macro-Mediterranean area. Alexandria, the Levantine urban background of endless cosmopolitan fantasies and desires, whose tangled heritages once made it a de facto Euro-Mediterranean harbour south of the sea,2 offered one among several possibilities of refashioning the new Republic of Egypt as an international player. If Cairo, the evermore centralising capital, cast itself as a major centre in the pan-Arabist project, Alexandria tried to recycle a postcolonial version of its Mediterraneanness. In this narrative, ‘Mediterraneanism, and a biennale to institutionalise it, appears as historical inevitability’.3 The Alexandria Biennale became a propaganda tool, which served the spreading of a special branding of official ‘Egyptianness’.4 The Biennale represented Nasser’s political ambition for a Mediterranean Egypt that, while still grounding part of its imagination in ancient Hellenistic glory, had turned fully revolutionary and aimed to obtain cultural relevance in contemporaneity. In order to achieve its goal, the Biennale constructed a fluid, slightly decentralised and expansive imagination of the Mediterranean, which sought to incorporate and reveal the Nasserian destiny of Egypt, as embodiment of the interlacing ideologies of Third Worldism and Internationalism. The first edition of the Alexandria Biennale took place in the same year of the Bandung Conference,5 and preceded by just few months the signing of the Declaration of Brijuni by Egypt, India and the former Yugoslavia (19 July 1956), which sealed the birth of the Non-Aligned Movement. It is not by chance that among the very first invited participants to the newly founded Biennale for Mediterranean Countries figures Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia, a country often overlooked in Western-European idealisation of the middle sea, which nonetheless played a central role in the new Mediterranean envisioned by the Egyptian government and portrayed by the Biennale. In fact, although it may appear nostalgically reminiscent of Greco-Roman antiquity, especially in the iconography it employed in printed and promotional material, the Alexandria Biennale was one of the earliest manifestations of the Nasserian desire to reclaim the Mediterranean by characterising it as a post-European geography. A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry This paper analyses the operations of Mediterranean-based ‘event-institutions’ that, like their forerunner Alexandria Biennale, engage in territorial conceptualisation of the Mediterranean as a unified, metaphorical space, and employ Mediterraneanness as a functional identitarian labelling. In doing so, I will try to address some of the most problematic consequences of the infiltration of reductionist Mediterraneanism in the thinking and making of contemporary European mega-shows. By ‘event-institution’ here I mean not just an art institution producing a programme of events on a temporary basis, but rather a cultural object that accomplishes institutionalisation through the performance of its own eventfulness. That is to say, at every new manifestation, the event-institution is called to adjust the time and space coordinates it comes to occupy, so as to produce a geography of reference upon which to cast its scopes. This mechanism, which complements the event-institution’s ‘ceaseless cycle of actualisation’, 6 might hardly be more self-evident than it is in the case of a biennial constantly on the run, like the selfproclaimed European nomadic Manifesta. It may therefore be of particular interest to assess how an event-institution doomed to constant geographical instability behaves in the encounter with the imaginative geography of the Euro-Mediterranean. In writing these lines I keep in mind the intricacies of two forms of Mediterraneanism. The first is the one theorised by anthropologist Michael Herzfeld, who adapted the term from Edward Said’s Orientalism. Herzfeld describes Mediterraneanism as a form of reification of the Mediterranean, able to turn it into a ready-to-go and all-encompassing analytic tool. Herzfeld’s Mediterraneanism is one of stereotypes and erasure of internal fractures, in the name of a supposed unity in plurality of the Mediterranean region; a AFTERALL In August 2020, in the midst of pandemic turmoil, Manifesta opened its thirteenth edition, hosted by the southern French port city of Marseilles. This was the fourth time the itinerant biennial took up residency in the Euro-Mediterranean, following Manifesta 6 in Nicosia (2006), Manifesta 8 in Murcia–Cartagena (2010–11) and Manifesta 12 in Palermo (2018). This edition combined three programmes: the exhibition Traits d’union.s, curated by Stefan Kalmár, Alya Sebti and Katerina Chuchalina; the education programme Le Tiers Programme and the programme of collateral events Les Parallèles du Sud. Similarly to the Palermo edition,7 the Marseilles biennial’s planning was kick-started by the production of a preliminary urban study the International Foundation Manifesta (IFM) commissioned Dutch architect Winy Maas and his team to conduct.8 The similarity between M13 in Marseilles and its predecessor M12 in Palermo does not stop there. The institutional – and, later, curatorial – narrations built around the choice of the two hosting cities are so alike, in the wordings and imaginings, as to give a sense of déjà vu even to the most distracted observer. Both cities are said to present unique sets of sociopolitical preconditions that the biennial will delve into; to be multicultural hubs shaped by migration fluxes and catalysts of transnational networks; to stand at the forefront of climatic and ecological emergency.9 But, above everything else, both are labelled as emblematic Mediterranean cities.10 These two Euro-Mediterranean urban landscapes are made to metonymically coincide with their positioning, which is spatial as much as it is cultural, social, political, historical. PAGE 127 *** A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry PAGE 128 AFTERALL categorisation that has often served the interests of (Northern) European and Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism.11 The second kind of Mediterraneanism is a self-inflicted one, conceived from within the Mediterranean shores of the European South. This is the Mediterraneanism shining through the romanticism incorporated in sociologist Franco Cassano’s concept of ‘southern thought’.12 In his writings, Cassano depicts the Mediterranean as a pluriverse, a concept/geography endowed with a harmonising quality, able to naturally foster the stable and joyful coexistence of differences. This is an un-opaque and fully representable imagination of the Mediterranean, which excludes cracks and gaps, and overlooks the lived experience of those who cannot afford to disappear in hybridity. Poignantly, scholar of the Black Mediterranean Camilla Hawthorn writes that ‘appeals to a sort of universal, transcendental hybridity have as their main consequence the preclusion of Blackness in Italy’.13 We could easily extend and adapt this consideration to the position of the many othered subjects inhabiting the Euro-Mediterranean.14 Both types of Mediterraneanism outlined above blend into the conceptual texture of Northern European Manifesta in the Euro-Mediterranean, as the biennial employs Mediterraneanist rhetoric to support the approximation of locality necessary to fulfil its institutional mandate. On the pages of the Manifesta 12 publication, Palermo Atlas, outspokenly pro-migration mayor of Palermo, Leoluca Orlando, defines the city as a ‘capital of the Mediterranean, that liquid connection between countries, symbolic of peace and human rights’ and goes on by stating that in the Mediterranean city of Palermo ‘there are no migrants; who arrives in Palermo becomes Palermitan ... Coexistence is part of the normal routine, no longer and not only a special project. The only race we recognise here is the human race.’15 One could forgive the simplistic utopian quality of a politician’s jargon, which conceals the bureaucratic viscosities, as well as the collective and personal traumas inherent in migration, displacement and racialisation with an edifying motto. However, it is less easy to condone this language when it comes from an institution that promises to act as an accelerator for new knowledge production and social transformation in the region it settles in, a biennial that aims to ‘turn signals into substance’.16 I have called the Euro-Mediterranean an imaginative geography, using a term first coined by Edward Said in his analysis of Orientalism.17 Imaginative geographies are ‘representations of places that express the perceptions, desires, fantasies, fears, and projections of their authors, who are generally external observers’.18 The EuroMediterranean, similarly to Said’s Orient, is far from being a natural or neutral geographical fact, the plain designation of territories bordering the Mediterranean Sea and belonging to the European continent. It is an arena of possibilities, formed and informed by European ambitions of identitarian possession of the Sea.19 In this sense, the Euro-Mediterranean exceeds both Europe and the Mediterranean, while generating exclusionary imaginations of both. The Euro-Mediterranean occupied by Manifesta in Palermo and Marseilles is a conceptualising space, and even more so ‘a choice made in pursuit of a goal’.20 In fact, since the biennial’s inception in the early 1990s, Manifesta’s institutional purpose has been to bring into focus the most time-relevant versions of Europeanness. In order to achieve the objective, the Netherlands-based International Foundation Manifesta ‘has consistently chosen unexpected host locations that reflect Europe’s ever evolving DNA’.21 Established In 2010–11 Manifesta returned to the Euro-Mediterranean, this time in the Spanish cities of Murcia and Cartagena. With the propositional title Manifesta 8 Region of Murcia in dialogue with Northern Africa, this edition of the biennial made clear from the beginning its desire to use the physical proximity of its hosting region with the Maghreb as an overarching theme. However, despite the title’s suggestion, of the over one hundred participating artists selected by the three collectives called to curate the biennial – Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, Chamber of Public Secrets and transit.org – only ten were Africa-based, only one from the Maghreb region. Nevertheless, a more substantial representation of voices from the continent would not necessarily have salvaged the biennial from its structural shortcomings, which stem from a fallacious understanding of geography as a useful metaphorical device rather than a collector of irreducible sociopolitical, cultural and historical complexities. During the years in which the biennial was organised, the then French President Nicolas Sarkozy campaigned for the creation of the Mediterranean Union, a project the conservative politician described as ‘linchpin of Eurafrica, the great dream capable of enthusing the world’.25 Although the resurgence of the colonial geopolitical construct of Eurafrica would sound like an intriguing topic to be touched upon in a biennial intending to establish a dialogue between Europe and the non-European represented by Northern Africa, the question was brazenly ignored. Manifesta 8 still favoured a more arbitrary reading of the Euro-Mediterranean space, grounded in ahistorical Mediterraneanist imaginations of the site,26 out of touch with current events as they unfolded. Similarly to Nicosia, Murcia and Cartagena offered the opportunity to project pre-existing institutional intentions upon what was perceived as an extreme periphery of Europe, i.e. a space able to guarantee forms of access to the other (the Eastern, the Southern, the nonEuropean). The Southern-Spanish location of M8 was functional to Manifesta’s own aspiration of transformation and development.27 A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry PAGE 129 The Cypriot capital of Nicosia offered an attractive location to host Manifesta 6. The southernmost capital of the EU, divided between a Greek and a Turkish zone, provided a unique opportunity for the Euro-biennial to access, or at least to locate, the non-European. The choice of this location, as one of the curators, Mai Abu ElDahab, puts it, ‘leaves the outsider wondering whether Cyprus is supposed to be a window on the fallacies of Eurocentrism or a wall to show where Europe ends’.23 The curatorial project to be implemented within Manifesta 6 was selected through an open call, and the choice made by IFM’s board was a bold one. Appointed curators ElDahab, Anton Vidokle and Florian Waldvogel put forward a proposal for the institution of an art school that was to take place on both sides of Nicosia for the duration of twelve weeks. This edition of Manifesta was destined to be among the most memorable, as it is the only one to have been cancelled before ever opening. Indeed, the sure appeal of the Euro-Mediterranean scenario of Nicosia clashed with the concrete difficulties of the actual location, with its present of lived and alive conflicts that the institution was not equipped to tackle.24 AFTERALL right after and in response to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the European biennial initially directed its efforts towards narrowing the West/ East divide, unwittingly reinstating the centre-periphery paradigm.22 As the original institutional agenda began to lose its perceived relevance, the attention shifted towards the possibilities offered by a North to South axis. A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry PAGE 130 The institution’s approach to issues of migration, asylum seeking, refugeeness, post- and neo-colonialism did not fully respond to the sociopolitical urgencies of the time, as it remained anchored to a self-referential exploration of the biennial’s possibilities of redefining itself in relation to a phantomised European borderland.28 *** Manifesta 13 in Marseilles abruptly closed its doors one month after opening, due to yet another escalation of the Covid-19 emergency. On 8 December 2020, an open letter signed by 37 members of the Manifesta 13 team was published on the online platform Le Club de Mediapart.29 In the letter, they lamented the appropriation and invisibilisation of their work in the accounts released to the press by M13 curators. The letter remarked the difficulties encountered by the local team working during the pandemic and having to act as sole mediator between the institution – from which the curators estranged themselves – and the complicated social contexts of the city. A mention was given to the fight against systemic racism, whose thematisation in the curatorial pondering did not prevent the curators from reproducing practices of marginalisation and structural violence. Furthermore, the letter highlighted how the projects activated by the education and mediation team were used as guarantee of local anchoring, whereas the fostering of new solidarities envisaged by the curatorial concept was left to linger in the sphere of good intentions. It is of interest here to notice how much the discontent expressed by the M13 team connects with fallacies determined by the illusage of curatorial abstractions of the political, social and cultural realities the biennial should navigate in the hosting city. The EuroMediterranean Marseilles is a container of usable tropes, whose pertinence to the institutional and curatorial aspirations seem to precede the actual encounter between the event-institution and the city. Indeed, despite all attempts to distance itself from the format of ‘traditionally curated exhibition of visual arts’,30 Manifesta still very much plunges into what curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung calls the ‘curatorial complex’, that is, ‘a tendency wherein or whereby most or everything is carefully trimmed to fit the orbit of the metaphor’.31 No solidarity-making proposition can ever come to fruition in this context, since there cannot be a truthful bond of care between a curatorial fantasy and an imagined geography. AFTERALL In order to break the deadlock, the itinerant biennial needs to renounce reductionist rhetoric and start entering its ever-changing locality as if ‘composed entirely out of a tremulous politics of difference’, as Okwui Enwezor once suggested.32 Manifesta is travelling back to the Euro-Mediterranean in 2024, for Manifesta 15 in Barcelona. This could be an occasion for the event-institution to shake off some of its Mediterraneanist habits and try to set up a relationship of care with its new geography ‘that is not just a figure of speech, not just a metaphor nor analogy, but an undertaking’.33 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry PAGE 131 3 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, New York: Vintage Books, 1993, p.7. The position of Alexandria within Egypt and Africa, as well as its special connection with the northern shores of the Mediterranean, is exemplified by the common use of the Latin locution Alexandria ad Aegyptum. For the Romans, Alexandria was located not ‘in’ but rather ‘by’ Egypt, and this understanding of the city as something other than Egypt resists through the ages to converge into the modern and contemporary representations of Alexandria as a cosmopolitan site. From the framing of Alexandria as ‘a coastal strip on which since the days of Herodotus European influences have rained’, a spillage of the West into the South, derives the myth of post-revolution Alexandria as a lost city. See Edward Morgan Forster, The Uncollected Essays of E.M. Forster (ed. Hilda D. Spear and Abdel-Moneim Aly), Dundee: Blackness Press, 1988, p.37. Indeed, the expulsion of Jews, French and English nationals from Egypt – following the 1956 Suez Crisis – has been reported in Western literature as an attempt to sever Alexandria from its European-oriented historical and cultural roots. For the cosmopolitan elites once dwelling in the port city, an Egyptian, Arab Alexandria is no longer Alexandria: ‘The city seemed to him listless and spiritless, its harbour a mere cemetery... All around him laid “Iskandariya”, the uncomprehended Arabic of its inhabitants translating only into emptiness.’ Michael Haag, Alexandria: City of Memory, Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2004, p.2. Dina A. Ramadan, ‘The Alexandria Biennale and Egypt’s Shifting Mediterranean’, in Adam J. Goldwyn and Renée M. Silverman (ed.), Mediterranean Modernism, London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018, p.347. Academic literature in different fields holds many definitions for the term Mediterraneanism, some of them to be explored in this text. In her paper, Ramadan employs the term in a looser manner, so to summarise a geographically ingrained cultural and political sentiment. Bassam El Baroni, ‘Remodelling Required: Official Biennales in Egypt and International Biennale Culture’, paper presented at the conference ‘Art Criticism & Curatorial Practices in Marginal Contexts’, Addis Ababa, 26 January 2006. The Afro-Asian Conference was held in Bandung, Indonesia, 18–24 April 1955. The conference aimed to promote cooperation between African and Asian nations after colonialism, and it is often referred to as the first major event in the Third-World Movement’s history. Sabrina Moura, ‘On the Verge of Now: The Crisis of the Future and the Urgencies of the Present in Contemporary Art Biennials’, March Meeting Papers, Sharjah: Sharjah Art Foundation, 2021, p.8. Manifesta 12 Palermo main programme, The Planetary Garden. Cultivating Coexistence, was curated by a team of multidisciplinary ‘creative mediators’: architects Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli and Andrés Jaque, film director Bregtje van der Haak and visual art curator Mirjam Varadinis. For Manifesta 12 Palermo, IFM commissioned the urban study be done by another Dutch firm, OMA. The project, led by Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, resulted in the publication of Palermo Atlas (2018). This phrasing is sprinkled all over the printed material produced by the two biennials, but see, for reference, Manifesta 12 Palermo. Guide Book, Milan: Edizioni Domus, 2018, pp.8–17 and ‘Concept & Plots’ and ‘About’ pages on Manifesta 13 website, available at https://manifesta13.org/about/index. html#marseille (last accessed on 11 January 2022). Palermo is an ‘iconic Mediterranean crossroad’; Marseilles is an ‘emblematic city in terms of its historical positioning in the Mediterranean’. See, respectively, https://m12.manifesta.org/why-palermo/index.html (last accessed on 26 January 2022) and https://manifesta13.org/about/index.html (last accessed on the 25 January 2022). Michael Herzfeld, ‘The Horns of the Mediterraneanist Dilemma’, American Ethnologist, vol.11, no.3, 1984, pp.439–54. See Franco Cassano, Il pensiero meridiano, Bari: Sagittari Laterza, 1996. Camilla Hawthorne, ‘In Search of Black Italia: Notes on Race, Belonging and Activism in the Black Mediterranean’, Transition, vol.123, 2017, p.165. As just one possible example, see anthropologist Naor Ben-Yehoyada’s work on the role of Mediterraneanism in the construction of personhood in secondgeneration Tunisian migrants in Sicily. N. Ben-Yehoyada, ‘The moral perils of Mediterraneanism: second-generation immigrants practicing personhood between Sicily and Tunisia’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, vol.16, no.3, 2011, pp.385–403. Leoluca Orlando, ‘Foreword’, in Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, Martina Motta, Giacomo Ardesio, Giulio Margheri, Paul Cournet and Marcello Caprino (ed.), Palermo Atlas, Milan: Humboldt Books, 2018, p.5. Hedwig Fijen, ‘The Biennial Beyond the Exhibition’, in Palermo Atlas, op. cit., p.9. ‘… imaginative geography of “our land-barbarian land” variety does not require that the barbarians acknowledge the distinction. It is enough for “us” to set up these boundaries in our minds, “they” become “they” accordingly, and both their territory and their mentality are designed as different from ours.’ E. Said, Orientalism, London: Penguin Classics, 2019, p.54. AFTERALL 1 2 A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 PAGE 132 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 AFTERALL 33 Caroline Desbiens, ‘Imaginative Geographies’, in Douglas Richardson, Noel Castree, Michael F. Goodchild, Audrey Kobayashi, Weidong Liu and Richard A. Marston (ed.), International Encyclopaedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment and Technology, first published 6 March 2017, available at https:// doi.org/10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg0865 (last accessed on 23 January 2022). The European logic of possessing the sea is manifest, for instance, in the tendency to never let go of the ancient Roman name for the Mediterranean, Mare Nostrum (our sea). The term has been widely employed by Benito Mussolini and the Fascist regime, to promote and legitimise the imperialist ambition of Italy to turn the Mediterranean into an Italian lake. Operazione Mare Nostrum is also the name of a short-lived military-led operation for the patrolling of the Strait of Sicily, launched by the Italian government in October 2013 in response to the exacerbation of the so-called ‘European migrant crisis’, and superseded by Frontex’s Operation Triton in October 2014. Roger S. Bagnall, ‘Egypt and the Concept of the Mediterranean’, in William V. Harris (ed.) Rethinking the Mediterranean, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p.347. ‘What is Manifesta’, available at https://manifesta14.org/about/what-ismanifesta/ (last accessed on 26 January 2022). However, it is worth noting that of fourteen editions of Manifesta only one took place in a territory that once lay behind the Iron Curtain, Manifesta 10, St Petersburg, 2014. Mai Abu ElDahab, ‘How to Fall with Grace – Or Fall Flat on Your Face’, in M. Abu ElDahab, Anton Vidokle and Florian Waldvogel, Notes for an Art School, Amsterdam: Manifesta, 2006. M6 was cancelled following the refusal by Greek Cypriot hosting partners to support the establishment of part of M6 School in the Turkish side of the city. See ‘Letter from former curators of Manifesta 6’, e-flux Journal, June 2006, available at: https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/41260/letter-fromformer-curators-of-manifesta-6/ (last accessed on 26 January 2022). Nicolas Sarkozy, Speech in Tangiers, 23 October 2007, available at https://web. archive.org/web/20140405140207/http://www.ambafrance-uk.org/PresidentSarkozy-on-Mediterranean,9743#menu (last accessed on 19 January 2022). ‘The south of Spain includes a blend of Islamic, Judaic and Christian cultural influences, co-existing for many centuries. Murcia and Cartagena were selected as host cities for Manifesta 8, largely as a result of the intertwining cultures in the region, its strategic location as a Mediterranean enclave and its particular character as an authentic melting pot.’ See ‘Region of Murcia in dialogue with Northern Africa’, Manifesta 8 website, available at http://arpa. carm.es/manifesta/manifesta8.manifesta_8_region_of_murcia (last accessed on 17 March 2022). ‘Manifesta 8 now engages with the north-south divide ... The European Biennial of Contemporary art is heading from trans-regional to trans-continental. This augurs well for the future of Manifesta as a global agency.’ H. Fijen, ‘Manifesta 8 Introduction’, in Manifesta 8 Catalogue, Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2008, p 23. Gilane Tawadros, chair of IFM’s board, remarks that the collectives curating M8 ‘have in many ways dispensed with the idea of border and boundaries in a geographical and political sense, elaborating curatorial approaches and methodologies that take little account of concrete, physical borders. Instead, each of the curatorial contributions reflects upon the production and transmission of cultural knowledge imagining new possibilities for curatorial experimentation in the 21st Century.’ G. Tawadros, ‘Manifesta 8 Foreword’, in Manifesta 8 Catalogue, op. cit., pp.15–17. See ‘Tribune d’un collectif de travailleuer.se.s de Manifesta 13’, 8 December 2020, available at https://blogs-mediapart-fr.translate.goog/un-collectifde-travailleurses-de-manifesta-13/blog/081220/tribune-dun-collectif-detravailleurses-de-manifesta-13?_x_tr_sl=fr&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_ tr_pto=op,wapp (last accessed on 24 January 2022). H. Fijen, ‘The Biennial Beyond the Exhibition’, op. cit., p.9. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, The Delusions of Care, Berlin/Milan: Archive Books, 2021, p.45. Okwui Enwezor, ‘Tebbit’s Ghost’, in Barbara Vanderlinden and Elena Filipovic (ed.), The Manifesta Decade, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005, p.185. B. Soh Bejeng Ndikung, The Delusions of Care, op.cit., p.59. A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry PAGE 133 AFTERALL Gamal Abdel Nasser visiting the first edition of Alexandria Biennale, 1955. Courtesy Centre D’Études Alexandrines A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry PAGE 134 AFTERALL Poster for the fifth edition of Alexandria Biennale, 1963–64. Courtesy Centre D’Études Alexandrines A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry PAGE 135 AFTERALL Teatro Garibaldi in Palermo, Manifesta 12 venue, 2018. Photo: CAVE Studio. Courtesy Manifesta 12 Palermo and CAVE Studio AFTERALL PAGE 136 A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry AFTERALL PAGE 137 A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry PAGE 138 AFTERALL Previous page: Famoudou Don Moye and Eva Doumbia, B-Vice Sound Musical School, Invisible Archives #6, Manifesta 13, from Le Tiers Programme at Tiers QG. Courtesy Manifesta 13 Marseille, VOST COLLECTIF and Maxence Villien A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry PAGE 139 AFTERALL Above: Manifesta 6 logo on a wall in Nicosia. Courtesy Manifesta, 2006