DESERTMED /  A project about the   deserted islands  of the Mediterranean

27.10 – 2.12.2012

“The range of islands has no objective unity, and deserted islands have even less. The deserted island may indeed have extremely poor soil. Deserted, the island may be a desert, but not necessarily. The real desert is uninhabited only insofar as it presents no conditions that by rights would make life possible, whether vegetable, animal, or human. On the contrary, the lack of inhabitants on the deserted island is a pure fact due to circumstance, in other words, the island’s surroundings. The island is what the sea surrounds and what we travel around. It is like an egg. An egg of the sea, it is round. It is as though the island had pushed its desert outside.”

Gilles Deleuze, excerpt from: Desert Islands And Other Texts (1953-1974), Semiotext(e), 2004: p. 11

DESERTMED is an interdisciplinary research project. The “blind spots” on the European map serve as its subject matter: approximately 300 uninhabited islands in the Mediterranean Sea. A group of artists, architects, writers and theoreticians travelled to almost forty of the ?often difficult to access? islands in search of clues, impartially cataloguing information that can be interpreted in multiple ways. The result is a pool of photographs, audio and video recordings, presented along with further artistic contributions. They examine the myriad ways in which the individual islands are used and – accordingly – their significant political, economic, and historical interrelationships.

Artists: Fabian Bechtle, Bik van der Pol, Leon Kahane, Deborah Ligorio, Stefanos Tsivopoulos, Luca Vitone

and the Desertmed Collective: Giulia Di Lenarda, Giuseppe Ielasi, Armin Linke, Amedeo Martegani, Renato Rinaldi, Giovanna Silva

with contributions by: Daniele Ansidei, Aristide Antonas, Giulia Bruno, Antonia Dika, Laura Fiorio, Stefano Graziani, Franck Leibovici, Donato Ricci

NGBK Working Group:  Fabian Bechtle, Wilfried Kuehn, Armin Linke, Marina Sorbello, Antje Weitzel

Exhibition Architecture: Kuehn Malvezzi

NGBK –   Berlin