Et si Carthage? takes its title from a question asked by Édouard Glissant: what if Carthage had not been destroyed? What might the Mediterranean have become had the Phoenician city, a place of crossroads and encounters, continued to exist alongside Rome?

The exhibition takes this question as its starting point and opens a moment in which the past, present and future of exile can be read transversally, as times that are all interconnected.

Nidhal Chamekh turns this question into a field of research. Through sculptural assemblages and drawings such as Masque noir, tête de Niobides (2023) and Calchi facciale (2023), the exhibition confronts the history of Mediterranean antiquity with the ways it was read and used by colonial ideology, and with the crossings and exiles of the present.

I accompanied the project from its research phase: following the work in the studio throughout the months of production, and building with the artist the cartography of concepts, images and references that structures the exhibition, from Glissant’s Carthage to the archaeological and colonial narratives of antiquity.