And the West did not exist. Al’ Akhawat
We traced the route on a map and discovered that the place we were looking for did not appear anywhere. Departures and returns, arrivals and stays, encounters, but also delimitations, transgressions, and abrupt cuts. We imagined the space between two places as a threshold filled with lines, a choreography that shapes the territory. We realized that places are defined by gestures. However, not all the spaces produced by our bodies are documented. How, then, can one recognize belonging to a place that remains outside the institutions that name the world and the ways of inhabiting it? And the West Did Not Exist is an attempt to narrate those intermediate spaces we move through.
To do so, the collective Al’Akhawat unfolds the chronicle of an imaginary journey through real places—nameless, familiar yet unrecognizable. Through the reproduction of procedures, documents, and artefacts that accompany our movements, the collective seeks to materialize some of the undocumented gestures that acknowledge the existence within and of a threshold-space. The central piece of the exhibition is a fabric that unfolds continuously through the space, creating a three-dimensional itinerary. The textile surface is intervened with photographs, texts, drawings, and embroidery, forming a kind of landscape painting that proposes other ways of looking at the world. Retor, a material used to make garment prototypes, evokes the experimental and processual character of this journey, as well as the corporeality present in any spatial narrative. Alongside the fabric, various elements such as photographs, maps, and postcards are distributed throughout the space.
This collection of pieces is articulated through the individual reflections of the collective members on the material memory of their families and the overlapping geographies to which they belong. At the same time, these souvenirs function as a counter-narrative to the spatial imaginaries generated by certain displacements which, frequently, overlook other forms of mobility that are equally fundamental in shaping the world.
