Who Owns the Trauma Blanket? Tracing Kader Attia's Ghost and the “couverture de survie” in Transit

ABSTRACT

In 2016 French-Algerian artist Kader Attia filed a lawsuit against the French rappers Dosseh and Nekfeu, accusing them of plagiarizing Attia's 2007 installation piece Ghost in their music video “Putain d’époque.” Looking closely at both artists’ work, I ask: what is at stake in Attia's claims of plagiarism, especially for an artist who traffics in bricolage, memory, and, in his own words, “les blessures” of history? I argue that, with the current refugee crisis in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, the “trauma blanket” (couverture de survie) is an object that travels—and appears, without plagiarism or copyright—in both real life and artistic productions depicting Mediterranean crossings.

KEYWORDS:

• Kader Attia
• Mediterranean
• refugee
• France
• contemporary art
• trauma blanket

Notes

1. I would like to thank the Memory and globalization in artistic and creative practices conference attendees at Université Jean Moulin in Lyon, where this paper was first presented in June 2017, as well as editors Maya Boutaghou and Bruno Jean-François for their insightful comments, and Daniel Purroy for his generosity.

2. Thanks to Maya Boutaghou for pointing this out.

3. Mabanckou, Alain. “Immigration, Littérature-Monde, and Universality: The Strange Fate of the African Writer.” Francophone Sub-Saharan African Literature in Global Contexts. Eds. Alain Mabanckou and Dominic Thomas. New Haven: Yale UP, 2011. 75–87.

4. Toivanen takes this term from Jopi Nyman's “Refugee(s) Writing: Displacement in Contemporary Narratives of Forced Migration.” African Writing Europe: Opposition, Juxtaposition, Entanglement. Eds. Maria Olaussen and Christina Angelfors. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. 245–268.

5. Binebine, Mahi. Cannibales: Traversée dans l'enfer de Gibraltar. 1999. France: Éditions de l'Aube, 2005.

6. The photo was taken by Rohit Chawla for the magazine India Today with Ai Weiwei's consent and participation. More recently, Ai Weiwei has again called attention to Alan Kurdi's fate and war and migration more generally in his Blue and White Porcelain Plate (Alan Kurdi). 2017, porcelain, Ai Weiwei Studio; and his Odyssey. 2016, wallpaper, Ai Weiwei Studio epic wallpaper piece, both on view in the exhibition Ai Weiwei On Porcelain (Ai Weiwei Porselene Dair). 12 Sept. 2017–28 Jan. 2018, Sakıp Sabancı Müzesi, Istanbul.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Megan C. MacDonald

Megan C. MacDonald is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Koç University, Istanbul. Her research focuses on contemporary francophone cultures. She is the co-editor with Claire Launchbury of the forthcoming collection Urban Bridges, Global Capitals: Trans-Mediterranean Francosphères (Liverpool) and her forthcoming monograph is titled The Postcolonial Navette: Francophone Passages and the Mediterranean Turn.