Joséphine Baker was one of the most celebrated performers of her time – a symbol of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties. The lesser known side of her career unfolded in the shadow of the Second World War. Baker at times travelled alongside, in advance of, or behind Allied soldiers, alternately conducting acts of espionage and entertainment. Her perilous trajectory across the shifting borders of the war zones of North Africa and the Middle East is known only in broad terms. Evidence that could detail the series of places where she performed between 1941 and 1943 is almost completely lost.

This ciné-roman* publication ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world…’ records the research project and film by Inez Weizman, which pursues the faint traces, speculations, rumours, and documents that indicate Baker’s presence in military camps, clubs, cabarets, casinos, theatres, and ‘gin joints’ across the region. Reconstructing the story of a few of the locations where Baker performed the exhibition aims to untangle a web of cross-border relations that have since become hardened by national boundaries, and of trajectories now severed.