Artists are mapping new itineraries of the Mediterranean, throwing into relief an incurable colonial wound that continues to bleed into the present.
The world-class €37 million Documenta arts festival comes to Athens – and brings challenging questions about art’s relevance amid economic and humanitarian crises.
Even at a celebrity art gala you can don an emergency blanket and feel good about yourself. Hard political questions, not required.
British opposition to search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean and Polish pseudo-theological justifications not to help refugees exploit the insecurities of the humanitarian movement.
The islands were ‘swept and sanitised’. An albatross/ was spared, and the order given: ‘…a few man fridays...must go’.
Both material and figurative walls are shaping our present. Now is the time for the arts and humanities to intervene with critical reflection and compassion into spaces of ‘crisis’.
When we let people die rather than provide safety, we face not a ‘refugee crisis’ but a crisis of values. The arts help define those values which shape the kinds of societies we want to live in.
