New Radicalisms 2024 biennial
Doe Neutraal

Artist talk and Workshop (limited to Grafisch Lyceum Rotterdam students)

'Written to not remain' is a visual investigation looking into the act of writing on the walls across Libya, each statement as a temporary evidence of a story, an event, social commentary, or often a protest, serving as testimonies of what can not be publicly declared, yet engraved on society’s tongues and collective memory as subtle and whispered dialogue, reflecting the state of the world through the manufactured wars in Libya. Many of those statements refuse the normalization of everyday violence and death, some are prevailing dark dystopian or alarming realities, in direct reference to previous frontlines and battlefields, and some carry the surreal irony of the times.

Tewa Barnosa’s work questions the notion of world building in those social gestures and their futures in a digitalized reality. She observes resilience and confirmation of the fact that humans will continue writing and engraving the evidence of this era on physical and digital surfaces alike. In this video work made in a virtual reality simulation, Barnosa recontextualizes a photo archive she began collecting from 2019 onwards, selecting and elaborating on a few happenings from over 200+ images of slogans, graffiti and wall tags as source materials alongside a narration and text recitation.