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Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 2004 by Maeve Connolly

Manifesta 5, running throughout the high season from June to September, is not easily ignored by tourists or residents. The 19th century seafronts and shopping areas are festooned with banners bearing the pink exhibition logo and a considerable number of prestigious architectural and cultural venues have been annexed for the duration of the show, blurring the already fuzzy distinction between art tourism and other forms of cultural consumption. A series of installations and ephemeral events are dispersed across landmark leisure spaces, such as a boathouse below the Aquarium, the summit of Monte Urgull and the Plaza Bilboa. The launch was also followed by a public parade, led by artist Jeremy Deller and intended to feature a deliberately eclectic array of participants, from the familiar (street musicians and clowns) to the bizarre (such as, for example, "single mothers" and "blood donors").

Many of the installations at the 16th century Musee San Telmo, a former convent converted into an ethnographic museum, deal with issues of national identity and history. Entry to the main exhibition is via a courtyard, that houses Algeria-France. Images (1998), a series of 27 framed posters by Marc Quer. The images on the posters are from a collection of 19th century ethnographic photographs taken by Felix Moulin, featuring native Algerians posed against a studio backdrop, ostensibly displaying their authentic costumes and customs. Quer added speech bubbles and posted the images throughout the Belsunce district of Marseille (a point of reception for many immigrants) in order to solicit comments and responses. These irreverent, often explicit, additions underscore the extent to which the images remain provocative, and the project as a whole derives much of its impact from its invocation of another context of reception.

The exploration of image and identity in Hito Steyerl's film November (2004) fuses an even broader range of cultural reference points, from martial arts and Russ Meyer movies to news footage and home videos of political protests. It is structured around Super 8 fragments of a feminist movie begun in 1983 but never finished, featuring the artist's friend Andrea Wolf as the glamorous leather-clad leader of a biker gang. Steyerl interweaves this material with later images of Wolf, a Kurdish activist who disappeared in 1998. Oscillating between humor, political passion and melancholy. November charts the complex temporality of popular political struggle, whereby the revolutionary fervor of October gives way to a more nostalgic investment in icons of resistance. Nostalgia (2002) is the theme, and the title, of another video work in San Telmo, this time a pseudo-autobiographical document of colonial Mozambique by Maria Lusitano. It too is assembled from an array of found sources, including postcards and home movie fragments, with a soundtrack punctuated by snippets of 60s pop hits. The film's confessional narration is delivered by a young girl, and instead of engaging with the realities of colonial life from the perspective of the colonized, its account of faraway places moves fluidly between memory and fantasy.