Musée de la Mémoire de la Mer et de l’Homme
The blog is a space to collect the art installations, poems, participatory art practices created by the Tunisian artist from Zarzis Mohsen Lihidheb, founder and curator of the Zarzis Sea and Man Memory Museum, which collects objects found on the beaches of southern Tunisia. His works deal with deaths and disappearances at sea, the search for freedom, journeys to the north, the environment and the sea as participatory community places.
The artist’s installations are made from the objects Mohsen retrieves daily from the beaches of Zarzis: clothing, personal items and messages from migrants, bottles, boat remains, shells.
https://bastaharraga-boughmiga.blogspot.com
Bouteilles à la Mer
Photo: Severine Sajous
The site is a platform for collecting the stories of people who have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean, particularly people who left Tunisia. The collection of the stories takes place in a participatory way with the families of the missing persons and is realised around the creation of a bottle in which photos of the missing person, personal objects, words, thoughts are placed to fight the oblivion into which these lives are dragged.
Couverture de la Mémoire Tunisie
‘We are mothers, sisters, Tunisian women who, on the border of the Mediterranean Sea, have lost our loved ones – sons, daughters, brothers and sisters – who have died or disappeared because of European migration policies that deny rights, stories and human lives. Many of our loved ones are still faceless numbers, disappeared in political and social indifference. To give these people a name and to recognise their stories, we decided to participate in the Yusuf Blanket project, born in Lampedusa in the aftermath of the drowning of little Yusuf, yet another victim of the barbed sea. Thread in hand, warp and weft, we build the ‘Blanket of Memory – Tunisia’. Each ‘tile’ that makes up the blanket corresponds to the story of a person who disappeared or died along the migration route. Each ‘tile’ represents a person we are still searching for and for whom we demand truth and justice. So that our sons and daughters, our brothers and sisters drowned in the barbed Mediterranean are not forgotten (…) The Blanket of Memory – Tunisia was therefore created with the aim of not allowing indifference to drag these stories into oblivion and erase the responsibility for these deaths.’
From the manifesto of “Couverture de la Mémoire Tunisie”
Lenzuoli della Memoria Migrante
Photo: Carovane Migranti
The project Migrant Memory Sheets was born within the Carovane Migranti collective in Turin with the artistic proposal of the artist Daniela Gioda, who began embroidering with red thread the names of the dead and missing on the migratory routes in order not to forget them and to honour their memory. Thus, the ‘Sheets of Migrant Memory’ spread across the ocean, colourful ones were born in the hands of the families of the missing from Central America (Guatemala and Honduras), one was embroidered together in Spain, in the Canary Islands, one was created by Tunisian mothers who lost their loved ones in the Mediterranean and wished to share it with the sub-Saharan migrant women of Medenine. Other sheets have started to be created in Montenegro, along the Balkan route, in the Piazza del Mondo in Trieste, in Basque Country, in Asti, Torino and Mondovì.
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FreeFemmes – Artisanes pour la Liberté de Mouvement
The craftswomen of the FreeFemmes collective active in Medenine, on the Tunisian-Libyan border, have created a sewing workshop against borders and racism: the practice of embroidery is a means of sharing and socialising the experience of violence at the border experienced as women and as migrants. The symbol of the union of women of different origins is synthesised in the ‘Dress of Freedom’: a dress sewn and worn by the women in which the words that have profoundly marked their migratory journey have been embroidered: Killing because of self-determination, rape, violence, racism, running for only life, cultural depression, banishment, coeurbrisé... Words that, like scars, describe the stages of the migrant women’s journey from their countries of origin to North Africa, at the many violent and painful junctions. In this sense, sewing and embroidery become the useful practices for building a female space of care, sharing and redemption in the hostile and racist context of the Tunisian south.