ON
BLACK
MED
ON
BLACK
MED
ON BLACK MEDITERRANEAN
ON BLACK MEDITERRANEAN
ON BLACK MEDITERRANEAN
ON BLACK MEDITERRANEAN
Since 2019 EX NUNC is engaged in an open conversation about some ideas around the idea of Mediterranean today. Read both as a –variously romanticised– landscape for exchange and cross-pollination and as a historically wounded territory of conflict, the complex geography of the Mediterranean region turns into object of scrutiny in the work of visual practitioners, writers, scholars. In recent years, following increasing media attention towards migration fluxes across the sea and the consequent fabrication of the permanent-state-of-crisis condition, the Black Mediterranean formulation has been more widely popularised. As an adaptation of Paul Gilroy’s theory of the Black Atlantic, the Black Mediterranean incorporates narratives of diasporic living, cultural transnationalism and hybridity, whilst dissecting questions connected to the reiteration of colonial power-structures, through practices of hierarchisation, domination, erasure.
EX NUNC seeks the pluralisation of Mediterranean(s), as interstitial geographies apt to division and connection, creation and negation. The Mediterranean seas and lands are arenas of contrasting historical movements, which keep on acting in the socio-economical and political realities of the present. But Mediterranean(s) are also (non-)spaces for speculation and invention. By inviting practitioners from different disciplines and backgrounds to share their own Mediterranean perspectives, EX NUNC proposes to facilitate an open conversation between dissonant voices, which address the intrinsically irreducible nature of a tentacular topic of investigation.
The project unfolds throughout EXN online platform, in combined interferences of images and words, gestures and sounds that occupy the discursive platform EXN Journal - On Mediterranean, and the digital exhibition site EXN Lagoon, which hosts online shows exploring many possibilities of Mediterranean(s) knowledges, beyond Euro-centric reductivisms.