call – 8 things (spring 2025)

any concrete or abstract, real or imaginary, material or immaterial object (which often cannot or does not want to be indicated precisely)

As broad as it is, the term “things” can be defined in very concrete ways: it can include very specific material objects – as banal as bottles, cups and cutlery, or of high cultural prestige as monuments, statues, fountains and ruins – but also intangible items such as songs, sounds and smells.

Things can take on a meaning that goes beyond their material extension and become bearers of powerful symbolism (think of the images of the teaspoon and the stick, evocative of the Palestinian resistance in recent years), they can tell family stories (necklaces, gold, trunks, trousseaus, houses and inherited treasures) or reveal the colonial repression that still hovers over entire peoples and places (as in the case of the radioactive finds abandoned in the Algerian desert by the French, or the artefacts stolen from former colonies and exhibited in Western museums).

Things document dissent (books, magazines, radios, telephones, cameras, photographs), convey it (banners, pamphlets, newspapers) and sometimes witness it silently but iconicly (like Omar al-Mukhtar's glasses and the famous shoes that the Iraqi journalist Muntazar al-Zaydi threw at George Bush in 2008). Things, however, can also become stereotypical symbols and devices for reproducing orientalist narratives: think of certain objects such as carpets, tiles, lamps, articles of clothing, amulets...