Carte blanche from François Prouteau, President of Fondacio: On April 22, a rubber boat with more than 100 migrants on board capsized in the Mediterranean, and ten bodies were found a few days later off the coast of Libya. This tragedy added to a grim tally reported by the International Organization for Migration: at least 453 migrants have disappeared in the Mediterranean since January 1, 2021.
In 2020, more than 2,200 migrants died in the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe, more than 10,000 since 2014.
UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay is traveling to Tunisia these days and will visit the Garden of Africa, where Algerian visual artist Rachid Koraïchi has created an oasis to provide a burial ground for the victims of such shipwrecks.
"For too long, humanity has shown helplessness, even indifference, while women and men drown and too many turn a blind eye," says Audrey Azoulay. "By giving a burial, we also restore the hope of an identity and therefore dignity to those who have perished." For this oasis-burial, Audrey Azoulay will offer The Tree of Peace, a sculpture by Hedva Ser, a work that brings together, in an interlacing of knotted branches and soaring doves, the values of peace promoted by the United Nations.
Today's inauguration of this African Memorial Garden is a testament to Rachid Koraïchi's commitment to humanity. This artist himself experienced the tragedy of such tragic crossings, when his brother, Mohamed, a year older than him, lost his life in the Mediterranean in 1962.
Rachid Koraïchi, during a 2019 lecture at the Catholic University of the West, expressed his outrage at the treatment of bodies recovered from the sea, thrown onto shore, or left abandoned in landfills. This is why Rachid Koraïchi purchased a 2,500 m² plot of land from the city of Zarzis to create this cemetery, financed solely by the sale of his works, but where none of them will appear.
A visual artist, landscape architect, and heir to a prestigious family descended from the Prophet of Islam, Rachid el Koraïchi, who has lived in France since 1968, knows no boundaries, either geographical or intellectual. Nourished by a long Sufi mystical tradition open to dialogue between religions, he likes to say that speech comes from the breath that animates his life and all his artistic work.
I can't wait to go to Zarzis, in the southeast of Tunisia, to visit this African Memorial Garden. We remember the beauty of another of Rachid Koraïchi's works, not far from here: his Oriental Garden in Amboise, always to connect humanity to history and never forget the greatness of every human being, their eminent dignity.
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