Not Yet Anywhere, 2010

Building on a lecture-of-letters first presented at Manifesta Coffee Break in Murcia in 2009, Take to the Sea expands a small exhibition room in the former abandoned post office into a performance space for speech acts. Here, across induced dislocations of distance and time, the speaker and the listener may not be together, but nor are they really alone nor separated. Concerned with instances when the sea becomes a wall, a waiting room or a passage to a prison cell, this project works through what might emerge from the vicinity of silence, to suggest an image to correspond to the invisible voice. "Absence settles in the crevices between what is said and what is heard, and sound, despite its complicity with language, urges an affect that extends beyond the violent affirmation of words."

Lina Attalah
1982, Cairo, Egypt. Lives and works in Cairo.

Laura Cugusi
1982, Sardinia, Italy. Lives and works between Cairo and Sardinia.

Nida Ghouse
1982, Bombay, India. Lives and works in Mumbai.

Long before it was officially named, Take to the Sea was conceived in an attempt for someone with the wrong passport to have the right reason to get the official letter that would then enable a visa to stay in Cairo. More formally, as an open-ended research project about "irregular" migration from Egypt to Italy via the Mediterranean Sea, it was initiated in 2008 and funded in its first phase by the Centre for Migration and Refugee Studies at the American University in Cairo. Since then, it has mutated many times. Different minds and motivations have migrated through it to produce sound, moving-image, and text-based works. In its most recent configuration, Take to the Sea turned the tide back in on itself to reconsider how its members inhabit some of the very conditions they seek to address.