Artists

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Saâdane Afif, Marwa Arsanios, Bianca Bondi, Teresa Margolles, Carlos Motta, Oscar Muñoz, Uriel Orlow, Nicolás Paris, Charwei Tsai

Press release

In 1994 Jorge Semprún published L'écriture ou la vie, a book of memoirs in which he recounts his deportation and captivity in the Buchenwald concentration camp, almost five decades aer his liberation. In the book he explains how, for a long time, the act of writing, recalling that horror, had become impossible for him, incompatible with his own survival. The price to pay to go on living had been deliberate oblivion. The dilemma faced by Semprún suggests a series of considerations about the capacities of writing and language, about what it is possible to express through words in the face of the unspeakable. Thus, we will be interested in the text that disappears, fading over time, or erased in an act of censorship, but which can also become a political instrument. Writing, ultimately, as an exercise of construction / suppression of reality and memory.