Alfredo JaarSearching for Spain, 2012
‘Searching for Spain’ is a lightbox by Alfredo Jaar that continues his critical engagement with geography, migration and the politics of visibility. The image was taken from the ruins of a destroyed palace in Algiers, looking out across the Mediterranean Sea toward Spain. Created in the wake of his earlier work, ‘One million points of light’, which reflected on the divide between the United States and Mexico, this piece similarly examines the threshold between two continents. Jaar’s practice often uses architectural or spatial metaphors to reflect on power structures and historical legacies, and here he draws attention to the complex relationship between Africa and Europe. The physical closeness of the two land masses is contrasted with the harsh realities of exclusion, displacement and aspiration that define contemporary migration.
The work is presented as a colour transparency in a lightbox. Through the framing of multiple openings in the palace’s crumbling façade, the viewer is offered a layered visual corridor that directs the eye toward the sea and, faintly, to the European continent beyond. The photograph captures a moment of stillness, yet carries the weight of historical and present-day tension. By situating the viewer inside a decaying colonial structure and orienting the gaze toward Europe, Jaar constructs a powerful meditation on distance, longing and the barriers, both visible and invisible, that continue to shape the global movement of people. The work subtly challenges romanticised notions of the Mediterranean as a space of cultural exchange, offering instead a sobering reflection on its role as a contested border zone.
