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Bidoun
Bidoun
Etats-Unis, trimestriel, 184 p., n° 19,
235 x 280 mm, 7,95 euros.
Editor in chief: Lisa Farjam
Senior editors: Negar Azimi,
Michael C. Vasquez
Creative director: Babar Radboy
Publisher: Bidoun Inc.
bidoun.com
Pour qui s’intéresse à la mode et à
l’art, le regard sur le Moyen-Orient
a évolué ces dernières années. De
Dubaï qui voue un culte au shopping
à Abu Dhabi qui s’ouvre à l’art avec un
Louvre et une foire, les signes se multiplient
pour signifier un mouvement
de fond. Pourtant, les formes légères
que sont les magazines, capables normalement
d’appréhender les soubresauts
des sociétés et des signes ne
jouent pas leur rôle, souvent barrés
par la censure et les tabous de sociétés
encore largement non démocratiques.
Reste la diaspora. Bidoun est édité à
New York et est une fenêtre ouverte
sur la création moyen-orientale, où
qu’elle soit. Les chroniques d’exposition
font voyager de Londres à New
York, en passant par Beyrouth. Des
images et de nombreux textes, souvent
des rencontres avec des artistes,
auteurs, musiciens donnent le ton d’un
magazine qui baigne dans l’histoire,
récente et actuelle, d’une région dont
la stabilité n’est que de surface, mais
dont les mutations sociales et esthétiques
sont inéluctables, à mesure que
les échanges d’idées et de formes se
développent. Au fait, Bidoun veut dire
« sans » en arabe et en farsi, pour signifier
le caractère apatride de ses contributeurs
et de sa scène artistique.
Extrait
One star is enough to make the cosmos
Alighiero e Boetti and the one hotel
In the spring of 1971, Alighiero Boetti
arrived in Afghanistan. The Italian
artist was seeking a “distant thing,”
he said. Certainly he has plenty to get
away from. Boetti’s career had begun
in the early 60s, in Turin, and his
spryly conceptual artworks had been
identified with the arte povera movement.
But he had drifted away from
arte povera’s “guerilla war,” and was
surely dismayed by the onset of the Italian
“years of lead”—bombings, kidnappings,
and shootings, perpetrated
by neofascists and leftists alike. Afghanistan
was a world away, a pacific, unspoiled
place of great natural beauty. “I
considered traveling from a purely personal,
hedonistic point of view,” Boetti
once said. “I was fascinated by the
desert…the bareness, the civilization
of the desert.”
That civilization, it should be noted,
had really great dope. Kabul was then
a way station for India-bound hippies,
seekers, and other Western expatriates
who would hang out on Chicken Street
in Shahr-i-Naw, downtown. Boetti
first stayed at a fleapit hostel, where he
embarked on a new work, 720 Letters
from Afghanistan. Naturally, he required
a lot of stamps. A waiter in the
hostel displayed considerable enterprise
in obtaining them, and one day
Boetti asked his new friend about his
dreams for the future. “I would love
to have my own hotel,” said the young
man, whose name was Gholam Dastaghir.
“And If I did, I would run it in
such a way that you would fall in love.”
Boetti already had. His first trip lasted
only a few months, but before the
year was out he would return with his
wife and small son. Back in Kabul that
autumn, Boetti sought out the waiter
and pressed a wad of bills into his disbelieving
palm. Together they opened
a hotel, which they named, after considerable
discussion, the One.
For all Dastaghir’s entrepreneurship,
the One Hotel was inarguably Boetti’s
place. The Italian returned twice annually
to his new Afghan retreat, often
with his family in tow. It was a small
place, but comfortable —his wife and
collaborator Annemarie Sauzeau insists
that Boetti, who died in 1994,
“was no masochist”—a pleasant bungalow
with a garden and a clientele of
hippies and Indian and Pakistani carpet
traders.
[…] Tom Francis, p. 30
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