2023, French national identity card, 105 x 74mm

 

In response to the massacre perpetrated in the Gaza Strip since October 2023, I have had my French national identity card redone, taking care to wear the keffiyeh I was given in Gaza on my identity photo.

 

In so doing, I thus operate a double status shift in a chaine reaction. My identity card, produced free of charge by the French state, becomes a work of art, legally unsaleable, which in turn redefines my status as a citizen to that of an artist-activist. 

 

The whole thing freezes my support for the Palestinian cause in the very heart of a document with a thousand privileges, the production of which makes the French state an accomplice, albeit unwittingly and only symbolically, to my action in support of a humanitarian cause that it shits on like its own motto (Liberty - Equality - Fraternity).

 

It goes without saying that this thumbing of the nose at a state that is complicit in this massacre by sending arms, by not recognising the Palestinian state or by not working to stop the association agreement between Europe and Israel is only a symbolic action that is commensurate with my means, which are small but very much present. In any construction, every stone counts.

 

P.S.: As luck would have it, this publication came out the day after war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu was interviewed on LCI (Bouygues) on May 30 2024. The situation in France is even worse than I thought. How naive of me. What a disgrace, but isn't that, according to Marx, a revolutionary sentiment par excellence?