Sea Memory Musee
“It’s time to watch life as it crumbles”.Eugenio Montale, ‘Ossi di seppia’.
Lihideb Mohsen in his Sea Memory Musee in Zarzis, Tunisia, gathers and organizes thousands of objects that he daily gathers on the shores of the Mediterranean, making them ‘ready made’. Objects assembled or simply drawn together become the art works of the world’s biggest collector: 26.820 different objects, as certified in 2002 by the inspectors of the Guinness World Records. Mohsen is not only an eco-artist: he is also a performer and he writes poems . . . Mohsen is a philosopher, a great soul and also a clerk at the local post office, and with this salary he supports himself and his family. Some months after the visit of the Guinness World Records inspectors the waters of the Mediterranean hand over to Mohsen a human body, to whom is devoted an installation in the middle of the museum. Mamadou - so he has named the body - wears the clothes of the dead shipwrecked, with the only addition of a straw hat to protect him from the sun. Mohsen says: “I was happy my friend wasn’t sleeping in the cold anymore.”