Cercle de Lectures - in black and white. Clichés of all kinds

On 22 October Corina Ciocârlie and the Cercle Cité are launching a new cycle of encounters alongside the mateneen exhibition. Writers and artists will apply the concept of the cliché – or stereotypical image – to examine the phenomenon of migration. Initially, they will consider Luxembourg as a Land of Milk and Honey and, more generally, what Andrzej Wajda called The Land of Great Promise in 1975.

What is it exactly that attracts those who leave their homeland? A mirage, an exotic name, a promise of happiness? Why do people set out for one destination or another – Arcadia or Utopia, Eldorado or the Garden of Eden, Łódź or Alexandroupolis, Amerika or Lussemburgo? In addition, when you embark for the New World and the Statue of Liberty awaits you with a sword, isn't there misrepresentation at some level?

From one crossing to the next, migrants are constantly duped, shunted about, swept along, submerged by the ebb and flow of contradictory emotions, by a Quixotic or childish hope that propels them toward a so-called Land of Marvels and invariably drags them back to the barbed wire of the Idomeni camps or the Calais jungle.

Great expectations and lost illusions… In the photo by Ann Sophie Lindström that closes the mateneen album, a man whose silhouette we can distinguish by the light of a street lamp is watching a flight of birds in a twilit sky, his back to a fence where, precisely in order to avoid accidents, trompe l'oeil stickers of birds have been placed.