Vision
Napoleon 12/A is a docu-poetic artist’s book in which Avi Sabag retraces the intertwined memories of displacement, migration, and his Mediterranean–Maghrebi heritage- It emerges from his memoire as a child in the Acre transit camp.
Activity
The artist book embodies a visual memoir that interweaves original texts and archival materials. It unfolds through an associative visual and design process in which all elements pulse through one another, forming an experience that emerges from a blurred, veiled memory—yet one that remains urgently present. It stages a dialogue between the documentary and the imagined, the edges of reality and dream, within a fluid and elusive space-time. Internal and external exile, as well as the memory of dispossession, inhabit voices and images that are themselves transient and fragmentary. Ultimately, this memoir belongs both to Sabag and to the individuals whose stories and voices he encountered. Their memories—photographs, drawings, sounds—together with extensive historical research, accumulate within the book, echoing and amplifying one another. They probe the locations of pain and rupture, fear and anxiety, joyful childhood recollections and the traumas that leave enduring marks on adult life. Are these found in distant voices, in preserved objects, in fleeting dreams, in dry bureaucratic documents? Napoleon 12/A offers an experience of the past within the present—fragmented, staged, oscillating between reality and dream—much like the artistic act itself