THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES, 2016

VOL. 21, NO. 2, 258–272

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2016.1131953

Bordering nowhere: migration and the politics of

placelessness in contemporary art of the Maghrebi
diaspora
Nancy N. A. Demerdasha,b
a
Department of the History of Art and Architecture, DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA;
b
Department of Art & Archaeology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

ABSTRACT
Inasmuch as the events of 2010 and 2011 ushered in tremendous shifts in
political consciousness across the Mashreq and Maghreb, they too increased
the mass movements and migrations of humanity. That Maghrebi spheres of
cultural production have sought to document and problematise these seismic
transformations is undeniable. While narratives of hardship, stagnation, and
political struggles undergird most analyses of the post-revolutionary Maghreb
and discourses of migration, this essay seeks instead to demonstrate how the
visual strategies of contemporary artists render the traumas of dislocation –
both real and metaphysical – and in turn, engender a politics and aesthetics
of placelessness. This essay probes into the placeless nature of not only the
artists’ liminal operations but also explores the conceptual methods through
which the tensions of migrancy are manifest. Yet, the question remains: How
does the trope of the border inform the creative expressions of not only
entrapment, but endless mobility? In what ways do these artists adopt visual
praxes that are politically engaged? How do fraught and layered transnational
narratives of migration speak to the complexities of placelessness and
displacement? How are the figure and position of the migrant visually treated
in their works? Commanding a transregional and liminal visuality, and guided
by the works of artists such as Bouchra Khalili, Yto Barrada, Kader Attia, Driss
Ouadahi, Mohamed Ben Slama, Zineb Sedira, and Moufida Fedhila, among
others, this essay theorises the political junctures and paradoxes of place/
placelessness, and the transnational networks of empathy and solidarity in
which these artists’ works are inscribed.

KEYWORDS Migrations; contemporary art; diaspora; Maghreb; displacement

We know that no one can close a border … The holes are everywhere. (Yto
Barrada)1

CONTACT Nancy N.A. Demerdash ndemerda@princeton.edu

© 2016 Taylor & Francis
 THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES 259

Introduction
The man’s journey begins in Annaba. As a fisherman and driver in Algeria, he
motions with his hand against a map, describing how he left for the border
between Annaba and Skikda. Sailing to Sardinia, it is then another 230 kilo-
metres to Naples, he says. Narrating his personal story of migration on this
map, he marks each node and perilous pathway with a permanent marker.
The candour of his description and the solid linearity of his pen’s markings
belie the layers of insecurity and violence within his actual journey. This is
the video entitled Mapping Journey #1 (2008), by Casablanca-born artist
Bouchra Khalili who filmed this account in Marseille.2 Stemming from a
larger, long-term video installation consisting of eight videos called The
Mapping Journey Project (2008–2011), this work documents the narratives of
those migrants who had survived their turbulent transmigrations, ranging
from stories told in Marseilles, Ramallah, Bari, Rome, and Barcelona (Canvas
Magazine 2014, 162–167). In challenging the normativity and seeming imper-
meability of geopolitical borders through the exercise of mapping, the narra-
tion humanises the experiences of these daily waves of migrants and
refugees, giving agency to their danger-filled peregrinations. Without ever
romanticising their plight, the filmic medium gives life to the parallel geogra-
phies and realities of lived, human struggle (Schoene 2012).3 Exploring the
ways in which cartography can be utilised as a tool of resistance, Khalili’s
films including Anya (2008) also underscore migration as an act of complete
bravura.
What makes her films so powerful and poignant is not only their simplicity,
but most importantly, the authorial focus and agency of the migrant; it is their
stories and struggles that command our attention. At a time when, at this very
moment, the mass media has rendered nameless and voiceless the thousands
of harraga4 and refugees risking dangerous trans-Mediterranean, trans-Atlan-
tic, and transcontinental paths to attain asylum, escape omnipresent violence,
catastrophe, and governmental repression, seeking an otherwise illusory pros-
perity, it is through their movements that the very spaces, borders, geopoliti-
cal hegemonies are being transgressed. From Lampedusa, to the fences of
Ceuta and Mellila, to the shores of Turkey and Greece, this mass-scale scatter-
ing of peoples has been taken up by multiple contemporary artists of Magh-
rebi background, within the diaspora.
Though Khalili’s praxis is not singular in conceptualising such precarious
transgressions, it offers a rich point of departure in our inquiry into realities
of displacement and placelessness – everywhere and nowhere at the same
time. Documentarian and performance-based strategies are at the heart of
many contemporary artists’ efforts. It is the ‘impossibility of sitedness’ that
drives these exilic explorations (Demos 2003, 69). In what follows, I examine
how the aesthetics and politics of border crossings, mobility, and
260 N. N. A. DEMERDASH

placelessness are visualised in the works of Franco-Maghrebi artists, namely

Yto Barrada, Kader Attia, Driss Ouadahi, Mohamed Ben Slama, Zineb Sedira,
and Moufida Fedhila. Collectively, these artists probe this existential in-
betweenness of being culturally, metaphorically, and I would argue, spatially
métissage (Anzaldúa 1987). Their work stands as an affirmation of liberation
and loss in displacement, but also a refusal to be mapped or located. But I
want to highlight a central paradox underlying this investigation: that the aes-
thetic language of placelessness is in fact rooted in and mediated through a
politics of place. I also stress this term as it embodies the absolute precarious-
ness, insecurity, and urgency of human life on the line. And though, as art
critic and theorist Okwui Enwezor deftly identifies, it is far more than a phys-
ical crossing of borders that unifies these cultural practitioners (Amor et al.
1998, 32).
Artists operating in the name of diaspora face challenges on multiple
fronts, often working against exhibitions that seek to define their work in
terms of cultural rootedness, or a ‘desire to reunite with, speak for, support,
and/or extend the cultural Imaginary of the homeland’ (Farzin 2012, 44–45).
But just as this tendency to frame works through cultural affinity is the insti-
tutional norm in museums and galleries (Gioni, Gary, and Natalie 2014, 21)5
and artists in turn dislocate the expectations placed on them by museums
or institutions using their work as mouthpieces for a region, or by global art
markets pushing for a contrived, and ultimately fabricated, authenticity
(Kasfir and Yai 2004; Murray and Derek 2008) (exemplified in Mohamed Ben
Soltane’s comic The Artist and the Emigrant (2010).6 There is an undeniable
manner in which these diasporic artists in particular – living between
Europe and the Maghreb – are individually grappling with the themes
dealing with those uncertain and interstitial zones between statelessness, pla-
celessness, exile, belonging, alienation, and displacement. It should be
emphasised that while these artists are, themselves, voluntarily diasporic,
there is a way in which their visual vocabularies speak, with great awareness,
of the plight of migrancy. Each of the artists explored here conveys his or her
own perspective or artistic vision, and I want to stress in turn that their aes-
thetic choices are, by definition, plural and multiple. It is the disjunctive spa-
tialities and aesthetics and poetics of migrancy undergirding their operations,
that interest us here.

Maghrebi diasporas ‘in migrancy’

As Carol Solomon rightly notes in her introductory remarks to her 2014 exhi-
bition, Memory, Place, Desire: Contemporary Art of the Maghreb and Maghrebi
Diaspora, Maghrebi cultural production usually receives cursory if not
altogether non-existent treatment in the discourses of African art and more
recent discussions of global modernisms (Solomon 2014, 9). Only recently
 THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES 261

has this disciplinary marginalisation within critical art history been recognised.
Unsurprisingly, exhibitions in Europe have propelled these discourses on con-
temporary Franco-Maghrebi diasporic arts forward, particularly with shows
such as Dégagements … La Tunisie un an après (2012) or Le Maroc contempor-
ain (2014–2015), both at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, or Un avenir en
rose – Art actuel en Tunisie (2012), co-curated by the Galeries ifa de Berlin
and Stuttgart. And on a local level, with the opening of institutions such as
the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Algiers in 2007, or the Mar-
rakech Museum for Photography and Visual Arts in 2013, there is evidence of a
need to publically grapple with not just complicated pasts, but to envision
and actualise future promises as well. Occupying the literally liminal region
between Europe and the Mediterranean, the Arab Mashreq, and sub-
Saharan Africa, the Maghreb – in its undeniable socio-cultural, linguistic,
and historical hybridity – not only defies categorisation of any kind, but the
region’s cultural pluralisms also resist containment.
Yet it is because of this defiance to geopolitical circumscription that this
diasporic arts scene is burgeoning with creative energy and taking centre
stage in many biennials, artistic circles, and shows. These artists’ aesthetics
of placelessness disrupts any essentialising reading of what Maghrebi art is
or does. Their tactics not only embody the networks of exchange that both
inform and inspire their work, but also the multidirectional and dialogical
spheres of empathy that continually reinforce their methodologies. Thus,
there is a uniquely politically engaged aspect to the praxes of Maghrebi
artists today. To reiterate Yto Barrada’s statement above, what are the holes
that people occupy today, and in what ways is this territorial permeability
visualised?
Postcolonial theorists and writers have been transfixed by the notion of the
‘third space’ as one that is simultaneously able to celebrate difference while
still projecting a universality. The hybridity expressed by these diasporic
artists is less an act of cultural translation and more a performance of what
Homi Bhabha dubs ‘the borderline work of culture’ (Bhabha 1991, 7). Similarly,
invoking Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of outsideness, art historian Kobena Mercer
identifies the dialectics of self and other as being so fundamental to the aes-
thetic praxes of the diaspora, with reference to artworks of black British or
African-American artists (Mercer 2012). In that vein, this analysis does not
seek to essentialise these artists of such heterogeneous backgrounds, but
rather, it seeks to trace the ways in which their praxes of outsideness, of pla-
celessness, are connected by a common investigation of mobility, migration,
exclusion, and solidarity. How these artists innovatively reconceive of the rea-
lities of liminality, is a major point of investigation. Echoing T.J. Demos obser-
vations on recent documentary practices, these artists’ work pushes viewers in
‘ … universalizing the migrant as the condition of being human, and deter-
mining a politics of equality on that basis’ (Demos 2013, 19). What these
262 N. N. A. DEMERDASH

practices demand us to grapple with, is our world becoming a ‘world in

migrancy’ (Soguk 2000, 417), in a perpetually deterritorialised state of becom-
ing (Sharpe 2005).

Revolutionary loss/revolutionary horizons

As the so-called Arab Spring catalysed new avenues for civic and political
engagement, artists, globally, also sought after new avenues for realising
public transformation. The lines between artistic activism and artistic practice
remain ever blurred. But the core of what is at stake lies not solely within the
act of representation itself, but also in the potential interventions that such
images and forms can undertake in highlighting political dispossession, dis-
content, and statelessness.
Moufida Fedhila, who now splits her time between Paris and Tunis, treats
the questions of repression, state authority, and patriotism materially. Born
in Mahdia, Tunisia and trained at both the École Européenne Supérieure
d’Art de Bretagne in Rennes and the Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne
in Paris, her artistic career reflects a clear political and philosophical engage-
ment with themes of alienation and disidentification. In You We Trust (2011–

Figure 1. Moufida Fedhila, In You We Trust (2011–2012), Mixed Media installation.

Courtesy of the artist.
 THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES 263

2012) (Figure 1), a mixed media installation piece, confronts the issues of
belonging and national patriotism full on. Six red flags are hung on the
wall, with their holes gapingly aligned in a continuum of emptiness. As
symbols of Islam, the red crescent moon (hilāl) and star have been excised
out, laying flat on the ground. Identity – both collective and individual – are
called into question. If trust is placed in the nation-state, this piece gestures
at the loss of such trust, into an utterly vacuous void, leading nowhere.
This deprivation is scrutinised further in the recent works of Kader Attia.
Arab Spring (2014) (Figure 2), a politically charged installation piece featuring
broken glass display vitrines, alludes, on the surface, to the rampant looting of
artefacts across the Middle East and North Africa. Egypt especially faced tre-
mendous looting in the wake of the 2011 revolution, effecting both the Egyp-
tian Museum in downtown Cairo and the archaeological museum of Mallawi,
during the protests of January 2011 and August 2013, respectively. With glass
shards strewn on the floor of the gallery space, again, one feels unsettled by
the violence and violations of revolutionary aftermath. Robbed of history and
heritage, identities must be reconceived and reclaimed from an alternative
space or record. But emptiness is crucially productive, Attia asserts:
The dialogue between empty and full is what, as I see it, governs the very raison
d’être of sculpture … this this relation between empty and full is a key that can

Figure 2. Kader Attia, Arab Spring (2014), Mixed Media installation and performance
(glass and wood vitrines, leftovers from building sites). Courtesy of the artist and
Galeria Continua. Photo Credit: Andrea Rossetti.
264 N. N. A. DEMERDASH

open onto an objective reflection about the world, the one we come from and
the one we are going to. (Durand 2010, 73)

It is these sorts of ruptures – of both existing historical narratives and notions

of patrimoine – that are fundamental to the creation of spaces of alterity.
Growing up between France and Algeria, Attia remarks that the ‘journey is
this space in-between, in which we are almost always involved without really
paying attention to it. Exactly like all immigrants, who are leaving their home
place … ’ (2008). From this, we infer that those very fraught, shifting modes
of identity construction for the migrant entail the dialectics and simultaneity
of erasure and preservation, loss and regeneration. Trained at the École Natio-
nale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and raised in Dugny, northeast of
Paris, the banlieue appears as a constant referent throughout his work. His
photographic series, Rochers carrés (Square Rocks) (2008/2009) (Figure 3)
upholds these tensions of an imaginary lurking in the horizon, capturing
youth scattered on the coastal, concrete blocks, near the Bab el Oued neigh-
bourhood of Algiers. In comparing the concrete of this breakwater structure
with the concrete of the housing projects in the Parisian banlieue, Attia asks:

Figure 3. Kader Attia, from the series Rochers Carrés (2008), photographic series, silver
print, 80 × 120 cm. Courtesy of the artist and the Barjeel Art Foundation – UAE; Collection
Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE; Private Collection Société Générale, France; and Galerie
Nagel Draxler. Photo Credit: Kader Attia.
 THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES 265

‘Do these young people, who scrutinize the horizon hoping to find an answer to
their misery, know what kind of environment they will end up in when they will
have accomplished the journey through the Mediterranean Sea?’ (2008). Speak-
ing about the horizons, metaphorical, and physical, in his series, Attia reflects on
what the threshold of the horizon signifies for migrants:
On the surface level, there is no boundary. Poverty indeed has no boundaries.
Still, these young people keep on dreaming about a world they think is better
on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea, whereas reality is worse and
worse for illegal immigrants in rich countries – France or elsewhere. Often
stated by the young people who try risk [sic] the danger of crossing the Medi-
terranean Sea and often perish on makeshift boats: ‘I would rather be eaten
by fishes [sic] than by worms.’7

Not only do migrants risk being swallowed by the turbulent sea, but they
risk being ensnared and criminalised in the failed, corrupt, paternalistic safety

Figure 4. Yto Barrada, Briques (2003/2011), C-print 2011 – 150 × 150 cm. ©Galerie Polaris
Paris and Pace Gallery London. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Polaris.
266 N. N. A. DEMERDASH

nets of state apparatuses (Alami 2013). Inasmuch as the space of the horizon
symbolises hope, yearning, or desire, it too suggests the ominous, wide-reach-
ing magnitude and governmentality of the state. The space of the horizons
remains ever elusive and out of reach.

Crossings and the futility of borders

Yto Barrada’s photographic study, A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project (1998–
2004), examines the encounters, dislocations, and moments of estrangement
of the Strait of Gibraltar. Having lived in the West Bank early in her studies,
Paris-born Barrada’s vast, multimedia œuvre – delving into film, photography,
installations – underscores the tensions within the thresholds of borders and
boundaries (Jackson 2011). As a start-off point for ‘a thousand hopes’ (Barrada
2005, 58) for many migrants, the landscape of Tangier in particular, in

Figure 5. Yto Barrada, Terrain vague #2 – Vacant Lot # 2 (2001). C-print 2007 – 100 × 100
cm © Galerie Polaris Paris and Pace Gallery London. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie
Polaris.
 THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES 267

proximity to the Spanish city of Ceuta, dominates Barrada’s work (Downey 2006,
620).8 With peoples crossing in all directions, every day, and under constant
military and police surveillance, in its security apparatus, the site transforms
into a place for tremendous creativity, with strategies constantly being rein-
vented so as to subvert the various infrastructures of borders – walls, fences,
and checkpoints. But the waterscape of the Strait itself signifies another void,
in that there is no sole government or state responsible for the passage; in
this narrow passage, there is a fundamental absence. In addition to the per-
meability of imposed borders along the Mediterranean, her other documentary
photographs feature walls of another sort. Taking up the subject of urban devel-
opment in Tangier, Briques (Bricks) (2003/2011) (Figure 4) documents processes
of construction, but seems to suggest the indeterminacy of an outcome,
whether the ground will be broken for a future home, or not. Terrain vague
#2 – Vacant Lot #2 (2001) (Figure 5), reveals the overwhelming enormity of
the walled enclosure, with its grazing, lazing sheep in the foreground
dwarfed by the looming, gray concrete. Sandwiched between the towering
slabs stands a bright sliver of an apartment complex. Capturing the prevalent
debates surrounding urban development projects and the transformations of
urban space in Morocco, Barrada’s works attest to the contested nature of
what kind of place these cities are to become.
In a more literal interpretation of hopes and fears, Tunisian artist Mohamed
Ben Slama takes a surrealist turn in representing the night crossing of a set of

Figure 6. Zineb Sedira, MiddleSea, 2008. Still from Video projection (colour, sound) 16
min, Super 16 mm, 16:9 format. Soundtrack by Mikhail Karikis. Production: Arts
Council England, London & Henry Moore Foundation, Liverpool. View of the exhibition
‘Shipwreck: The death of a Journey’, kamel mennour, Paris © Zineb Sedira/DACS,
London. Courtesy the artist and Kamel Mennour, Paris.
268 N. N. A. DEMERDASH

migrants, with only the moonlit sky to light their journey, in his oil on canvas,
Nejma et hlel (Star and Crescent) (2011). The boat’s travellers imagine them-
selves in wildly diverse ways, with an eerie, superman-like figure as their de
facto captain. The ever-present bodily abject – vomit, urine, waste – putrefies
the experience on board just as the fantastical, hybrid guests visualise their
own individual avatars. Perhaps a commentary on the transition, the
border, of the multiple, nationalist imaginaries of Tunisian citizens as they con-
ceive of a new government, Ben Slama’s subjects hover in a darkened ambiva-
lence between myth and reality, abject and exalted.
Crossings are also invoked in the double video projection short film Saphir
(2006), by French-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira, plays on the double entendre
and homonym of the French saphir, for sapphire, and the Arabic safīr, denot-
ing an ambassador. The Safir Hotel, incidentally, was also one of the many
landmarks of French colonial Algiers. Sparrows in flight can be seen fluttering
and chirping outside of the subdued Italianate-style apartment complex,
gridded with balconies. Two lives are positioned in dialogue, as a seated

Figure 7. Driss Ouadahi, On the Other Side (2006). Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and
Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco.
 THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES 269

woman sits still, holding her espresso in a café while in the juxtaposing image
a man stands off of the maritime port of Algiers, gazing, presumably, into the
water. The lighting, the fading in and fading out of each scene, casts a melan-
cholic, even romanticising, aura. But as Richard Dryer rightly interprets, this
film does not necessarily represent the desire for escape, but perhaps can
offer a poetics of departure (2009). This sense of unease is palpable in her
other films, which both document and provide a commentary on migrations.
MiddleSea (2008) (Figure 6) features a similarly sombre emptiness, as it was
shot on a boat en route from Algiers to Marseille. Capturing the combination
of pain and uncertainty in departure, her art forms demonstrate sensitivity to
what she deems to be ‘universal ideas of mobility, memory, and trans-
mission’.9 The vast open waters threaten to engulf the viewer, striking a
chord of empathy for those who put their lives in jeopardy for a place that
cannot yet be seen, but only imagined.

Conclusion
On the Other Side (2012) (Figure 7), a hyperrealist oil on canvas by Algerian-
Moroccan artist Driss Ouadahi, pictures a wire fence, punctured, warped,
and clearly transgressed. Inviting his audience to ‘project themselves into a
transcended space’ (Triki and Ouadahi 2012), Ouadahi confronts the ineffec-
tuality of this prop of exclusion. Marking the vestiges of mobile bodies, the
crooked infrastructures of containment bear witness to their futility. A
gaping hole intimates release. Placeless, but nevertheless situated in the com-
plicated, interpenetrating terrains of expectation, frustration, loss, and hope
for a different future, these artists and their works collectively illuminate the
fissures and interstitial coordinates of those in transit. They situate this dialo-
gical placelessness within the complex emotional, legal, and physical experi-
ences of migration – neither here, nor there. As our positionality constantly
shifts, so to do our affiliations, identifications, transculturations. Where these
poetic geographies and imaginaries of migration might eventually lead, is
nowhere yet to be found.

Notes
1. Barrada (2005). See also San Francisco Museum of Modern Art interview, ‘Yto
Barrada on the Ways the Strait of Gibraltar Shapes Life in Tangier.’ See http://
bcove.me/cqwr19lu and http://bcove.me/y7rqf2lb
2. See discussion offered by Bouchra Khalili at the 10th Sharjah Biennial, sponsored by
the Sharjah Art Foundation. https://vimeo.com/17756648
3. Schoene (2012)

… it is inspired by a cinematic process based on the interrelation between on-

screen and off-screen spaces, which allows both a metonymic and deictic visual
270 N. N. A. DEMERDASH

approach, suggesting a reflection on the ability of human experiences and clan-

destine existences to generate an alternative geography – a geography of resist-
ance. I was interested in confronting the most normative drawing that exists – a
map – with most singular situations and experiences. But in this work, the
peculiar aspects of word, speech and language become an imaginary dimension
of the image, because through the narrative and the way it is told, the viewer is
led to mentally reconstruct the whole journey, revealing a form of fictional
dimension of the project, even though all the trajectories are absolutely real.

See also http://www.sharjahart.org/projects/projects-by-date/2011/the-mapp

ing-journey-project-khalili
4. Harraga, stemming from the Arabic verb ‘to burn’, refers to those individuals who
burn their identity papers. Professor Reda Bensmaia’s remarks from the July 1, 2014
meeting of the NEH Summer Institute pushed us participants to problematize the
positions and institutional representations of the harraga. See also Pandolfo
(2007). Fernandez (1999).
5. This was challenged succinctly in the exhibition, Here and Elsewhere, held at the
New Museum in 2014. Natalie Bell and Massimiliano Gioni ask: ‘Can art history
ever completely let go of artists’ origins or cultural affinities?’
6. See (2012, 61–62). Mohamed Ben Soltane’s cartoon, stained with coffee, illustrates
the external, market-driven pressures on artists of Muslim backgrounds to reproduce
derogatory stereotypes. This is typified in the gallerist’s suggestion to the artist, ‘But
… why don’t you work on subjects more specific to your CULTURE?!!! Like battered
women, for example … .’ Born in Sidi Bou Saïd, Tunisia, and trained at the Institut
Supérieur des Beaux-Arts in Tunis, Ben Soltane’s The Artist and the Emigrant (2010)
demonstrates the phenomenon of artists being typecast and pigeonholed by the
art market. For further discussion on this problem in art markets, see Mercer (1994).
7. Attia, http://kaderattia.de/rochers-carres-2/
8. ‘The documentation of injustice – or the discursively segregated other – can often
present an aesthetically overdetermined subject who in consequence becomes not
only decontextualized but symptomatic of both suffering and otherness. The aes-
thetic impulse can often usurp the documentative imperative’.
9. Sedira (2006), http://www.zinebsedira.com/sites/default/files/Z.S%20Statement.pdf.

Acknowledgements
Without the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the impec-
cable organisation and intellectual generosity of Joseph Krause and Nabil Boudraa in
their Summer Institute, ‘Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia: Literature, the Arts, and Cinema
since Independence’, this project would have been otherwise impossible. I am
indebted to the speakers who came and imparted their immense seas of knowledge:
James Le Sueur, Réda Bensmaïa, Jane Goodman, Eric Sellin, Mary Vogl, and Cynthia
Becker. My tremendous gratitude is also due to the many truly invested, engaged col-
leagues who participated in the institute as well, sparking rich discussions and debates
throughout. But most of all, I dedicate this piece to the thousands, who daily risk their
lives, seeking their place in this world.

References
Ahmida, Ali Abdullatif, ed. 2009. Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghreb:
History, Culture, and Politics. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
 THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES 271

Al-Mousawi, Nahrain. 2015. “Aesthetics of Migration: Street Art in the Mediterranean

Border Zones.” Ibraaz. January. http://ibraaz.org/essays/116.
Alami, Ahmed Idrissi. 2013. “Dialectics of Desire, Victimhood and Postcolonial Migrancy
in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Leaving Tangier.” South Central Review 30 (2): 1–31.
Amor, Monica, Okwui Enwezor, Gao Minglu, Oscar Ho, Kobena Mercer, Irit Rogoff.
1998. “Liminalities: Discussions on the Global and the Local.” Art Journal 57 (4):
Winter, 28–47.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands: La Frontera, the New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt
Lute Books.
Attia, Kader. 2008. Artist’s Statement, “Rochers Carrés” Sharjah Art Foundation. http://
www.sharjahart.org/projects/projects-by-date/2009/rochers-carras-attia.
Attia, Kader. 2008. “Rochers Carrés.” http://kaderattia.de/rochers-carres-2/.
Attia, Kader. 2008. “The Space, Another Body.” http://kaderattia.de/the-space-another-
body/#more-540.
Barrada, Y. 2005. A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project. London: Autograph, ABP.
Bhabha, Homi. 1991. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Barbara Barsch, Christine Bruckbauer, and Alexis Baatsch, eds. 2012. Un Avenir en Rose:
Art actuel en Tunisie. Berlin: ifa-Galerie; Kerber Art.
Demos, T. J. 2013. The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global
Crisis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Demos, T. J. 2003. “Desire in Diaspora: Emily Jacir.” Art Journal 62 (4): 68–79.
Downey, Anthony. 2006. “A Life Full of Holes.” Third Text 20 (5): 619–629.
Dryer, Richard. 2009. “Zineb Sedira: Saphir.” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art
24: 116–119.
Durand, Régis. 2010. “Kader Attia in Conversation with Régis Durand.” Nka: Journal of
Contemporary African Art 26: 70–79.
Farzin, Media. 2012. “Imaginary Elsewhere.” Bidoun, Summer, 44–45.
Fernandez, J. 1999. “Passages à Tanger.” Revue de Socio-Anthropologie 6: 65–78.
Gioni, Massimiliano, Gary Carrion-Murayari, and Natalie Bell. 2014. Here and Elsewhere.
New York: New Museum.
Issa, Omayra. 2014. “Bouchra Khalili.” Blackflash Magazine, Spring/Summer, 49–55.
Jackson, Amanda Crawley. 2011. "’Cette Poétique du Politique’: Political and
Representational Ecologies in the Work of Yto Barrada.” L’Esprit Créateur 51 (1): 53–67.
Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield and Olabiyi Babalola Joseph Yai. 2004. “Authenticity and
Diaspora.” Museum International 56 (1–2): 190–197.
Mercer, Kobena. 2012. “Art History and the Dialogics of Diaspora.” Small Axe 16(2): 213–
227.
Mercer, K. 1994. “Black Art and the Burden of Representation.” In Welcome to the Jungle:
New Positions in Black Cultural Studies, edited by Kobena Mercer, 233–258. London:
Routledge.
Murray, Soraya and Derek Conrad Murray. 2008. “On Art and Contamination:
Performing Authenticity in Global Art Practices.” Nka 22/23, Spring/Summer, 88–93.
Nawi, Diana. 2015. “Other Maps: On Bouchra Khalili’s Cartographies,” Ibraaz 008, 15
January. http://www.ibraaz.org/essays/115.
Pandolfo, S. 2007. “‘The Burning’: Finitude and the Politico-theological Imagination of
Illegal Migration.” Anthropological Theory 7 (3): 329–363.
“Profile: Bouchra Khalili.” 2014. Canvas Magazine, 162–167.
Schoene, D. 2012. “Absorbing Displacement: Bouchra Khalili in Conversation with
Dorothea Schoene.” Ibraaz 003. Accessed September 27, 2012. http://www.ibraaz.
org/interviews/40
272 N. N. A. DEMERDASH

Sedira, Z. 2006. “Artist’s Statement.” http://www.zinebsedira.com/sites/default/files/Z.S

%20Statement.pdf
Sharpe, Matthew D. 2005. “Maghrebi Migrants and Writers: Liminality, Transgression
and the Transferal of Identity.” Dialectical Anthropology 29: 391–421.
Sloman, Paul ed. 2009. Contemporary Art in the Middle East: Artworld. London, 12–25.
Soguk, Nevzat. 2000. “Poetics of a World of Migrancy: Migratory Horizons, Passages,
and Encounters of Alterity.” Global Society 14 (3): 415–442.
Solomon, Carol. 2014. “Introduction: The Maghreb and Contemporary Art,” in Memory,
Place, Desire: Contemporary Art of the Maghreb and Maghrebi Diaspora, 9–12.
Haverford, PA: Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery; Haverford College.
Triki Rachida, and Driss Ouadahi. 2012. “‘If Walls Could Talk … ’: Driss Ouadahi in
Conversation with Rachida Triki.” Ibraaz, May 24 2012. http://ibraaz.org/interviews/27.
Copyright of Journal of North African Studies is the property of Routledge and its content
may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright
holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for
individual use.