More about The Paradise Belongs to the Strangers
To those men who have not emigrated, lived in the most cruel tortures, the mufti gave them the name of Gurabah, Strangers, and referring to the Word of God’s Messenger: “Islam started being weird and will remain strange to the end. Paradise is of strangers. Amin Maalouf , Leo Africanus
The Paradise Belongs to the Strangers is configured as an open project in process ( since 1999) in which, through publications, courses, workshops and exhibitions, analyzes the construction of the image of the Arab-Islamic world in the West arises. Thus, the object of study is not so much the other as ourselves, for the framing of identity occur through establishing oppositions operations requiring the exclusion of those elements likely to cast shadows of doubts on the image integrity of their ideal. The idea of the West is inconceivable if not in its exclusive relationship, its external position with respect to the East. The dominant culture in the West refuses to recognize the weight and the omnipresence of Arab contributions to civilization. It is a conscious and deliberate rejection of the elites.
The objective is to analyze the artifact before our eyes appears as Arab-Islamic world of meanings (open and obvious ones, subtle and oblique others) that serve as vehicle in a given cultural context, from where these images are produced and speeches and how the media and entertainment industry create, maintain and exploit that stereotype we have to subvert, by a review that does not reject the ironic potential of parody and caricature, and reveal the mechanisms of colonial representation and neocolonialist.