What we are proposing is the first chapter of “Atlas of Ghosts – Directing notes for The Nigger of the 'Narcissus” ,curated by Pietro Floridia e Sara Pour. It’s a hybrid book, halfway between a directing notebook and a visual essay, which, waiting for its last drafting, will be published by Cantieri Meticci in few months.
The underneath narrative structure is based on Joseph Conrad’s novel The Nigger of the 'Narcissus that has been rescripted, adapted and staged by Cantieri Meticci during Atlas of Transitions Biennale – Home in March 2019.
The novel has been analyzed as if it were a sort of ghost catalogue the Withe West has build over and to the detriment of African descending people. The word “Nigger” has been, therefore, understood as a complex dispositif, made up of very different dynamics, whose overall effects bring to negation of the individual under ghostly masks. To fully understand how it works, we chose to follow research paths as heterogeneous as the life experiences and sensibilities of the company members. Therefore, chapter by chapter, we disassembled each dynamic, turn it into a title, and then each actor has tried to sift through their inner or outer worlds in search of similar cases, episodes, images that might have a sort of familiar resemblance with the dynamic under investigation.
Lastly, thanks to the work of Sara Pour, we have transformed all the cases, stories and instances into images intending to have a common key of understanding that would allow us, by using these pages as an editing board, to compare or contaminate even very distant fields: the body, the life experiences, the geopolitics of the current migratory phenomenon, the historical dimension, the cultural frames, the theories...
The result is an Atlas of Ghosts, a playing field in which -we hope - the reader can create his own montages and exercise not a definitional thought, yet one focused on metamorphosis, in which understanding occurs by observing the transformations the images undergo as they migrate from context to context.