Ana Maria Garcia Nolasco da Silva
Member of the Research Unit in Design and Communication (UNIDCOM) of the Creative University of Lisbon (IADE-U) and of the Centre for Comparative Studies (CEC) of the University of Lisbon.
analascosapopt@gmail.com
In the same way each re-invents his own childhood by creating a narrative – one out of many possible others – with which he identifies in the present moment, so can it be said that national identities are continuously created retroactively though discourse, of which their citizens are active participants.
This exhibition addresses the question of cities and their connectivity in the Mediterranean over two radically different time periods. The first section follows a well known historical and geographical sequence through time and space, the Mediterranean of the 16th and 17th centuries, by exploring the connections between six cities (three from the Hapsburg Empire, and three from the Ottoman Empire) which were allied, in opposition, or in a power dynamic of domination. Here the itinerary of the exhibition reflects the geographical space of the Mediterranean : visitors enter in the east by Istanbul, circulate towards Venice and Algiers, before approaching the western part of the Mediterranean, from Genoa to Seville, concluding in Lisbon, the opening to the Atlantic. In the second section, the exhibition presents the cities of the contemporary Mediterranean : two metropolises (Marseille and Casablanca) and two megacities (Istanbul and Cairo).
They are stories from which the narrator takes on the ambiguities of the discourses of negritude and whiteness, racism and antiracism, the plasticity of discrimination, the trap of stereotype, and the awareness of prejudice. These are stories that point us to a common past made up of very different memories.
It is a fact: societies forget. Forgetting is a necessary process for creating collective identities, political solidarities and projects of social governance. It plays a role, too, in survival and rebeginning after civil wars or other crises in which societies break down.
Ana Maria Garcia Nolasco da Silva
Member of the Research Unit in Design and Communication (UNIDCOM) of the Creative University of Lisbon (IADE-U) and of the Centre for Comparative Studies (CEC) of the University of Lisbon.
analascosapopt@gmail.com
In the same way each re-invents his own childhood by creating a narrative – one out of many possible others – with which he identifies in the present moment, so can it be said that national identities are continuously created retroactively though discourse, of which their citizens are active participants. 
This exhibition addresses the question of cities and their connectivity in the Mediterranean over two radically different time periods. The first section follows a well known historical and geographical sequence through time and space, the Mediterranean of the 16th and 17th centuries, by exploring the connections between six cities (three from the Hapsburg Empire, and three from the Ottoman Empire) which were allied, in opposition, or in a power dynamic of domination. Here the itinerary of the exhibition reflects the geographical space of the Mediterranean : visitors enter in the east by Istanbul, circulate towards Venice and Algiers, before approaching the western part of the Mediterranean, from Genoa to Seville, concluding in Lisbon, the opening to the Atlantic. In the second section, the exhibition presents the cities of the contemporary Mediterranean : two metropolises (Marseille and Casablanca) and two megacities (Istanbul and Cairo). 
They are stories from which the narrator takes on the ambiguities of the discourses of negritude and whiteness, racism and antiracism, the plasticity of discrimination, the trap of stereotype, and the awareness of prejudice. These are stories that point us to a common past made up of very different memories. 
It is a fact: societies forget. Forgetting is a necessary process for creating collective identities, political solidarities and projects of social governance. It plays a role, too, in survival and rebeginning after civil wars or other crises in which societies break down. 
