The Stranger's Notebook: An Existentialist Journey Between Displacement and Finding Home
A year-long journey from Nigeria, to Morocco, to Europe saw Dawit L. Petros at the odds of conflict in displacement. Exploring the relationship between African histories and European modernism, the multidisciplinary artist's works are always based around extensive research and travels - his newest project, 'The Stranger's Notebook', follows this same course. The exhibition will form the first of a trilogy of works investigating migration as a key constituent of modernity. Photography, moving image, objects and sound draw on research and an accumulation of work produced by the artist during made works for the series in cities including Bamako (Mali), Nouakchott (Mauritania) and Dakar (Senegal).
The project’s title makes reference to Albert Camus’ L’Etranger, and the experience of outsiderness evoked in the existentialist novel. It also alludes to Georg Simmel’s idea of the ‘paradoxical stranger’: a potential wanderer, who is at once both near and far. Its modus operandi, however, was inspired by a travelogue written at the turn of the 20th century by Fesseha Giyorgis, an Abyssinian cultural figure widely regarded as the father of Tigrinya literature. About the Author’s Journey from Ethiopia to Italy and About the Impressions Made on Him by His Stay in That Country in Tigrinya chronicles Giyorgis’ travels from Massawa, on the Red Sea coast, to Italy, where he lived and worked for five years.
The text provides a rich counterpoint to the common contemporary narratives of migration and challenges the legacy of European colonialism against which these narratives continue to unfold. In The Stranger’s Notebook (Prologue), Petros considers the complexity of migratory movements within Africa and questions the privileging of certain narratives of migration over others. The works selected for the exhibition indeed challenge the lack of a critical framework available in conceptualising accounts of cross-border flowing within the African continent.
The pictorial elements, which oscillate between figuration and abstraction, combine the descriptive character of photography with theatrical possibilities of performative still life. The video and sound components gesture towards a more fractured aesthetic, anchored within multiple viewpoints.
The result is the artist’s proposition for an aesthetic and political language that points to the potentiality of mobile practices while offering disquieting, liberating possibilities to articulate the relationship between self and place.
Dawit L. Petros - The Stranger’s Notebook (Prologue) opens 20 May and runs until 25 June 2016 at Tiwani Contemporary.
www.tiwani.co.uk
