The arts can be seen as an area of social change. Photography can be witness to the transformation of a society. In a context of marginalization of the Arab world, the mass deportation of Africans and Europeans and rejection of their values, we want to change the simplistic and stereotypical representations of the peoples of the southern Mediterranean creating positive images of its members. Photographs can open existing models that help us understand the world and update their representations. The new images produced can create some alternatives to exclusion, prejudice and simplistic ideas evoked earlier.
Golden Brown Begins with reflections on colonial cinema Between 1910-1970. The directors of these documents were produced a significant social representations denigrating the African, Arabic and the southern towns. These images, recorded by specialists in documentaries about wild animals, to give knowledge of distant & exotics populations. By the middle of the documentary film created to explain with scientific discourses African or Middle Eastern societies.
Often these documents were created in a propaganda view for justify colonial occupation and to conclude about the inferiority of the black man with his archaic society and the need to impose the modern models of civilized societies. There has been a significant number of these images ridiculing these societies and their members by removing their right to speak in his own name and the power to represent themselves. The colonial film has generated many mental patterns that devalue and stigmatize African and Arab populations. These representations are undervalued individuals come from these areas. The current problem is that it continues to harm individuals by the facts that these models have not been updated and return date. That is an ancient representation that does not correspond to reality and has not been updated by individuals.
That explain it seems important to generate images That Can be useful for the empowerment and the re-Appropriation of representations of an individual about their own society. Change models, updating outdated images and go beyond stereotypes and prejudices thinking.
www.ziadzitoun.com
Thematics of inspiration by Ziad Zitoun revolves around rights of migrants, trans-borders movements & refugee Asylum. His works speak about familial separation, stigmatization and social invisibility that produce clandestinity life.
Ziad Zitoun gives thoughts on the South-North relations and be testimonies of persons who live without dignity, without fundamental rights (health, work, education). The author speak about them people who try to survive, persecuted only for the fact they are "illegals".
Every year, thousands of people from all over the world, afflicted by economic, social and political hardship. They escape from wars, dictators governments or misery. They migrate to Europe in attempt to attain better living standards. Every day a lot of people perish on the way.
The author studies related social problems and it transcribe it in contemporary art domain for create aesthetic of migration. Art has for centuries been deeply estimated by the presence of immigrant artists and them fresh ideas. Today, more than ever before, the population reflects global patterns of migration, and this is evident in the art add a value of diversity in our contemporary societies.
www.ziadzitoun.com
