> Marcel Odenbach (alem)
Im Schiffb ruch nicht Schw imm en könnnen (Foundering, And You Can’t Swim)
8:23
2011
In the video we see three men from Africa, from Nigeria and Cameroon, so-called migrants, visiting the Louvre in Paris and studying a painting: The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault (1819). Besides the Mona Lisa, this painting is not just the most famous in the Louvre; it also sums up the entire calamity of French colonialism and was a public provocation: the failure of the Europeans in face of themselves. Under the flag of the grand nation and the idea of revolution, liberty, and fraternity, people turn into cannibals. In front of this painting the three Africans reflects their own journey to Europe, their motivation and their lives, their homesickness, worries, fears and becoming foreign in their own country. “Sitting at the beach and dreaming of faraway places. But what happens when these faraway places become your new home?”
