This essay addresses itself to the formidable Algerian artist Rachid Koraïchi’s Le Jardin d’Afrique. The spectacular naming of this cemetery bears testimony to his humanist commitments and efforts to interweave art and politics by revealing the enforced aversion toward migrations and border-crossings. He created Le Jardin to restore the deserved dignity and respect of those who drowned in the Mediterranean en route to Europe. Koraïchi’s Le Jardin not only speaks to the place of art as a purposeful human endeavor, but also unmasks his profound grasp of the place of burial in the symbolic cosmos and life-worlds of African societies as elsewhere in the world, across environments, cultures and faith traditions. In such a worldview, Koraïchi’s own subject-position as an African in the world whose cognizance of the ties that bind the dead to the living comes into play. At once a site of memorialization and remembrance, Le Jardin is also a project about the dead as much as the living and an extraordinary place of reflection. This resting place is a telegraph to a world heedless of the cruel predicaments of the aspiring young African sojourns.
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