Rajwa Tohmé
Lignes de fuite / Un projet de cartographie itinérante des camps - Installation - 2016
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 18
Installation
I wanted to go back to Beirut. I went to the camp in Calais. I stayed there. I had the vague feeling I was looking for something or someone I had lost.
Babel of modern times. In Calais every language is spoken. In Calais, everyone has the same goal: to cross to the other side, to make it to England. I found a place that had nothing but that was bubbling over with life, tormented, shifting, continually changing. A non-city traced and retraced every day by the movements of its transient inhabitants.
Refugee camps do not exist on the map of the world. I decide to trace their contours, to draw them. To leave a trace of the temporary, to freeze the ephemeral. To record their movements, to chart their “wander lines.” I went back to Beirut. I wandered. To other camps. Took other roads. All the way to Syria. These routes became my own. These stories, too. Then the camp in Calais was destroyed. Half-destroyed. Return. The place I had known was gone, but the people and their stories had stayed there. I lived there too. . Always, trying to understand. A network was woven. Everything was connected. My story. Their stories. My routes. Theirs.
“We are nothing. It is what we are looking for that is everything.” Hölderlin, Hypérion ou l’Hermite en Grèce, 1797-1799
This project presented in the form of an installation was conceived as an online platform that will gradually integrate new itineraries and new data in relation to the cams.
www.vanishinglines.org
Rajwa Tohmé
Née en 1983 à Beirut, Liban. Vit et travaille à Beirut, Liban.
Ecole ALBA - Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts
2015 Wajd (Installation / Poème visuel) – Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing.
2011: Brainwash (Installation) - Sai_ Urban Gardens, Beirut, Liban.
2009: 4 murs et une ville (Livre d’artiste)- CCF, Beirut, Liban.
2005: _Confusion (Animation - 4”) - Berlinale Talent Campus, Berlin, Allemagne.
2005: Loulou et le ballon rouge (Animation - 6”) Festival de cinéma Né à Beyrouth, Beirut, Liban.
