Jesse Budel – www.jessebudel.com

We exist and at the same time we do not

Two-hundred years ago Théodore Géricault painted The Raft of the Medusa. This painting shows what happens nowadays with the refugees that risk the crossing the ocean to another country, where they hope to find happiness or something else. They arrive in a culture that possibly doesn’t fit, and perhaps some don’t want it to fit.

For this project I recreated The Raft of the Medusa. I worked together with artist Peter George d’Angelino Tap. He made a collection of dresses with the title Panta Rhei (everything flows). All the dresses represent a country in Europe that lay along the rivers, like the Rijn, the Donau, the Wolga and all the others. The dresses are originally made for women, so most of the male models don’t fit in the dresses. This resembles a possible misfit between cultures. My version of The Raft of the Medusa shows hope and despair and raises the question if and why we exist.