Being No One is an installation that emerged from the collaboration between the photographer Aleix Plademunt and the writer Borja Bagunyà, with music by Tarta Relena. The installation is part of a larger project that retells Odysseus’ journey through today’s Mediterranean.
Over three and a half years, Bagunyà and Plademunt retraced Odysseus’ return journey through the Mediterranean, from Hisarlik, Turkey to Corfu, passing through Djerba, Messina, Lipari, Capri, Cythera, Belyounech and Ceuta, among others. This updated version has uncovered the tension between the image – a particular image – of the Mediterranean and the waste it generates and which sustains it: the tension between underwater currents and trade routes, between tourist consumption – as an agent of desertification – and landfills, between global mobility and identity-based radicalizations. If Odysseus was the first tourist, the contemporary Mediterranean is, in part, his creation.
In an era dominated by imaginaries associated with strong identities, at a time when we are told to always be “ourselves”, to live “authentically” and to find our true essence, the possibility of playing at de-identifying ourselves opens up subjective, ethical and political horizons that are worth exploring. Like Odysseus when he stood before the cyclops Polyphemus, Being No One settles into this territory to investigate what happens in the moments when certain kinds of identity are suspended. What do tourists look at? Are they looking with their own eyes? What kinds of lives or practices come into play when we focus our attention on things that aren’t-fully-there, or aren’t-always-there, or aren’t-always-the-same? This piece invites us to move through a residual space until we reach a double projection, where we will be forced to decide what to look at, in other words, where to look, and from where.
Credits:
- Idea and direction: Borja Bagunyà and Aleix Plademunt
- Production: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB)
- Music and vocals: Tarta Relena
- Spatial design: MAIO Architects
- Sound design: Jonathan Darch
- Audiovisual editing: Tomás Longato Arnedo, Aleix Plademunt, and Carlos Marques-Marcet
- Colourist: Lita Bosch
Marina Garcés, Mabel Tapia, Aida Míguez and Miquel Bassols participated in the research on Homer’s text and its contemporary readings.
This installation is part of the Cities and Tourism project, financed with support from the Barcelona City Council and the Barcelona Provincial Council.
