Monaco – Alexandria, the big detour, soon at the Villa Saubert – Pages Monaco
Monaco-Alexandria presents itself as an exhibition emancipated from the spectrum of nationalist and European-centered art history. In this respect, it is remarkable for Monaco and its New National Museum for the reimbursement of North-South relations, in particular between the key areas of Mediterranean Europe and included in its African and Eastern dimensions.
In this perspective, the NMNM in collaboration with Zamân Books & Curating, proposes to bring together Monaco and Alexandria, namely two world-cities with eloquent and yet little-known links, which are woven in the heart of the twentieth century through transnational themes: (post) orientalist ballets and shows, southern surrealism, flora and fauna, feminist eroticism, urban development and nightlife; ultimately, the symbols and the poetics of cosmopolitanism through two great Mediterranean crossroads; both marked as much by the imprint of dreams and tourist myths as by that of the avant-garde in exile. Beyond the major themes mentioned, it is about writing a new page in this connected and often French-speaking history, although shaped between several contact areas (Monaco, France, Italy, Hungary, Greece, Egypt, etc.).
Crossbreeding and feminism
Monaco, like these other crossroads of influence, was built through a great mixing of populations and communities; not lands of immigration but real cosmopolis: port cities with hundreds of different nationalities through their migratory, political and cultural history – beyond a relationship between locals and foreigners, world-cities. Of course at two very different scales, that specific to Monaco (the second smallest state in the world after the Vatican) and that of Alexandria (“the” capital of the Mediterranean between 1850 and 1950) but which converge in the dynamics. Mediterranean capitals.
Monaco-Alexandria is also marked by a strong presence of female protagonists from all walks of life, long marginalized by authorized history (written by men) while they fully participate in these Egyptophile avant-garde.
This story made of almost secret but structuring links the southern experience of modernity is embodied in figures of writers, poets, painters, decorators and philosophers all embodying a desire to come true between fluid and cross-border worlds; beyond the rise of nationalisms and fascisms they had to face.
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