Since July 6, the Villa Arson in Nice has been hosting the exhibition by Lebanese filmmakers and visual artists, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. The idea for the exhibition came about during a discussion with Eric Magnon, the art center’s director. It’s an original exhibition on a subject far from trivial: spam and more specifically, scam emails.
These artists have collected, archived, and studied more than 4,000 of them, tracing some cases back to their origins. Who hasn’t received an email from Nigeria, promising a sum of money supposedly from an inheritance, a gold mine, or an oil well? As unbelievable as they may be, these emails still intrigue even the most gullible among us.
How do they operate? What type of emails do they send? How do they target their victims? This is essentially what this exhibition tells us, through original and informative installations.
From the start, the tour offers quite a unique experience and engages the visitor. Plunged into a dark room, overwhelmed by voices all speaking at once, this is what the atmosphere is like when entering the dimly lit space. Black walls, floor, and ceiling, illuminated only by the light of 23 television screens. Arranged in a semicircle, they dominate, assault our senses, and create a feeling of dizziness. It’s impossible to decipher what is being said unless one gets very close to a screen. The visitor feels attacked, overwhelmed by these emails. This is how the artists chose to symbolize the phenomenon of phishing emails.
It was even more important for them to study this subject as the victims of these schemes often do not complain or file a report. It was therefore interesting to materialize the content of these emails through a voice and a face.
Later, we learn that this practice is part of a tradition dating back to the 18th century, the Jerusalem letters, considered the ancestor of the scam. It uses a similar structure today: a person claims to possess a large sum of money that needs to be transferred quickly. A significant percentage of this sum will be given to anyone willing to help, a stranger, considered the only trustworthy individual in their circle. If the “victim” agrees, they are gradually asked to advance money to cover imaginary fees before the transfer is complete. This transfer will never happen.
The most surprising part of the exhibition concerns the representation of the trajectory of these emails. Each steel rod represents the path a mail takes between two countries. Together, they form a sculpture. This sculpture shows the countries where these practices are most concentrated and those that are the most targeted. Beyond that, the study shows that scammers draw from recent political, economic, religious, ecological, and financial events to make their scams convincing and credible to their victims.
Thus, the countries most affected by this phenomenon are found in Africa, Asia, Russia, and the Arab world more generally, where the context presents a new opportunity to exercise this practice.
