Il n'y a plus Rien (There is Nothing Left), 2010

A woman describes the city of Alexandria, saying "Il n'y a plus rien" ("there is nothing left"). The sentence turns into a refrain, addressing the difficulty in exploring the past and seeing the present, in a city built precariously upon shifting strata of erasure, disappearance and forgetting. Two sequences of slides unfold between a curtain and mirrors: the first follows the production of cotton grown in Alexandria in the first half of the century and ending at the now-shut cotton mills in Lancashire, England; the second is an individual story of departure from Egypt, thus forecasting the massive emigration to take place a few decades later. The multiple projections and reflections reconnect these two, intimately related movements.

Céline Condorelli 1974, Paris. Lives and works in London. Céline Condorelli works with art and architecture, combining a number of approaches from the development of structures for "supporting" (the work of others, forms of political imaginary, existing and fictional realities) to broader inquiries into forms of commonality and discursive sites, resulting in projects merging politics, fiction, public space and whatever else feels urgent at the time. Céline Condorelli is the author/editor of Support Structures (2009) and one of the founding directors of Eastside Projects, an artist-run exhibition space in Birmingham, U.K. Recent exhibitions include Revision, part 2 at Cell Project Space, London (2010), Generosity is the new Political at Wysing Arts, Cambridge, And the columns held us up at Artists Space, New York City (2009). Recent projects include developing -Support Structures (phase 1-10), with artist-curator Gavin Wade, various sites (2003-2009). Her project for Manifesta 8 focuses on the fragile urban infrastructure and "scaffolding" of a city such as Alexandria in Egypt.