Events

Yemen today

Saturday, April 22, from 3 pm to 6 pm

Murad Subay, untitled, 2011

Roundtable mod­­er­ated by Anahi Alviso-Marino (curator of the exhib­­tion One of Many Stories) with Nasser al-Aswadi (artist), Laurent Bonnefoy (polit­ical sci­en­tist), Franck Mermier (anthro­pol­o­gist) and Marine Poirier (polit­ical sci­en­tist).

This round-table dis­cus­sion aims at addressing one of the ele­ments that under­pins the exhi­bi­tion One of many sto­ries: Yemen’s cur­rent war sit­u­a­tion.
Since the end of 2014 and the begin­ning of 2015, the mil­i­tary offen­sive con­ducted by the Houthis against Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s gov­ern­ment has been inten­si­fying in order to push back the tran­si­tional pro­cess that has been ini­ti­ated under the latter’s pres­i­dency in 2012. In 2015, the res­ig­na­tion of both the President and the gov­ern­ment pre­cip­i­tated the country in an unprece­dented crisis. “De­ci­sive Storm”; a mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion led by Saudi Arabia with the sup­port of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrein, Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Sudan was launched during the night from March 25 to March 26, 2015. Today, the bomb­ings per­sist, the Yemeni his­tor­ical her­itage is being destroyed by mil­i­tary attacks, and the number of civil vic­tims increases while corpses con­tinue accu­mu­lating in some of the streets of the country. The ongoing bomb­ings con­tinue to diminish the prospect that the con­flict would end rapidly. The speakers of this round-table dis­cus­sion will bring to con­ver­sa­tion ele­ments that con­tex­tu­alize the ongoing bomb­ings in Yemen. They will also con­tex­tu­alize, from their own area of exper­tise, a close-reading of some of the doc­u­ments that are dis­played in the exhi­bi­tion.

Anahi Alviso-Marino is cur­rently a FMSH/CEFAS post­doc­toral fellow and an asso­ci­ated researcher at the CESSP/France and CRAPUL/Switzerland. She obtained her doc­torate in Political Science at the University Paris 1-Sorbonne and the University of Lausanne, researching the polit­ical soci­ology of visual arts in Yemen. The Societé Academique Vaudoise in Switzerland awarded her dis­ser­ta­tion, and it also received a spe­cial men­tion from the jury of the 2016 Dissertation Prize on the Middle East and Muslim Worlds (IISMM and GIS), France and an honor­able men­tion from the 2017 Rhonda A. Saad Prize com­mittee, United States. Her cur­rent pro­jects focus on archival and ethno­graphic research in visual arts in Gulf coun­tries such as Kuwait and Oman. Her pub­li­ca­tions include peer-reviewed arti­cles, pop­ular pieces, book chap­ters and cura­to­rial pro­jects.

Nasser Al Aswadi was born in October 4th, 1978 at al Hujr vil­lage, not far from Taiz, the third city of Yemen. He studied archi­tec­ture in Taiz and then in Sanaa. Since 2008, Nasser has been moving between Yemen and France. For Nasser Al Aswadi, cal­lig­raphy is a means to express both feel­ings and thoughts without nec­es­sarily tying them to lan­guage. He resorts to Arabic let­ters, words and forms; to reli­gious and musical sources. His work is inspired by the Arab Spring events, by daily real­i­ties, rural land­scapes and archi­tec­tures.

Laurent Bonnefoy is a Research Fellow at CNRS, at the CERI / Political Science lab. Specialist of pol­i­tics and Arabian cul­ture and Arabic lan­guage, he has been working on the Salafist move­ment and on the con­tem­po­rary Arabic penin­sula. He is the co-director of the ERC pro­ject “When author­i­tar­i­anism fails in the Arab World (WAFAW).” He has been working at the French center for arche­ology and social sciences in Sanaa for four years, and at the French Institute of Middle-East for other two years. His pub­li­ca­tions mostly deal with Islamists move­ments and the polit­ical pro­cesses imple­mented in Yemen. He is the author of Salafism in Yemen. Transnationalism and Religious Identity (Hurst/Columbia University Press, 2011), and has co-directed Yémen. Le tour­nant révo­lu­tion­naire (Yemen. The rev­o­lu­tionary turn Karthala, 2012) and Jeunesses arabes. Du Maroc au Yémen : loisirs, cul­tures et poli­tique (Arab youths. From Morocco to Yemen: leisure, cul­ture and pol­i­tics La Découverte, 2013). He just fin­ished the writing of Yémen, par delà les marge (Yemen, beyond the mar­gins), which is to be pub­lished by fall 2017, by Fayard.

Franck Mermier is anthro­pol­o­gist and director of research at CNRS, and member of the l’Institut Interdisciplinaire d’Anthropologie du Contemporain (EHESS-CNRS). He has been living in Yemen for about ten years and directed the Centre Français d’Etudes Yéménites in Sanaa (1991-1997). He pub­lished Le cheikh de la nuit. Sanaa, organ­i­sa­tion des souks et société citadine (The Night Sheikh. Sanaa; the souk orga­ni­za­tion and the city society Actes Sud/Sindbad, 1997) and co-directed Le Yémen con­tem­po­rain (Contemporary Yemen, Karthala, 1999) with Rémy Leveau and Udo Steinbach, and Yémen. Le tour­nant révo­lu­tion­naire (Yemen. The Revolutionary Turn, Karthala, 2012) with Laurent Bonnefoy and Marine Poirier. Franck Mermier also directed the depart­ment of con­tem­po­rary studies at l’Institut Français du Proche-Orient of Beirut (2005-2009). A great part of his work deals with urban soci­eties and cul­tural pro­duc­tion in the Arab world. Among his pub­li­ca­tions we can men­tion Le livre et la ville. Beyrouth et l’édition arabe (The book and the city. Beirut and the Arabic edi­tion. Actes Sud/Sindbad, 2005) and Récits de villes : d’Aden à Beyrouth (Stories of cities: From Aden to Beirut, Actes Sud/Sindbad, 2015). He coor­di­nated Regards sur l’édition dans le monde arabe (Perspectives on the edi­tion in the Arab world, Karthala, 2016) with Charif Majdalani. In May 2017 a col­lec­tive book which will gather texts trans­lated from Syrian and Yemeni authors will be pub­lished under the name of Syrie-Yémen, d’une guerre l’autre (Syria-Yemen, from one war to the other, Galaade).

Marine Poirier is a PhD in polit­ical science (CHERPA / IREMAN, Aix-en-Provence). Her thesis focused on the sup­port to the author­i­tarian Yemeni regime (2008-2011) and its logics. She pub­lished sev­eral arti­cles on polit­ical par­ties and mobi­liza­tions and on the rev­o­lu­tionary pro­cess. She codi­rected Yémen. Le tour­nant révo­lu­tion­naire (Yemen. The Revolutionary Turn ; Paris, Karthala/CEFAS, 2012) with Laurent Bonnefoy and Franck Mermier.