*in collaboration with Enrica Cavarzan
PARALLEL is a publication intent on collecting testimonies, writings and images that reflect upon aspects of human movement across territories, with an emphasis on desire and destination. Functioning as both a case study of a selected location (the part of the Mediterranean Sea between North Africa and southern Italy) and an investigation into the role of the printed press in the formation of public opinion and identity related to this place of heightened migratory transit.
The mediatization of facts and events related to migration has greatly contributed to the general confusion and controversy regarding this specific site.
An Introduction, Ten Years Later
It was in 2009 when we finally made the journey from our island, Venice, to another, Lampedusa, located between Italy and Tunisia. Far from the glistening fame of the former, it was increasingly coming to media attention for the growing number of ‘clandestine’ migrants and asylum seekers reaching its shores, in search of refuge in Europe. With an unknowable number of deaths in transit, at that moment it seemed that the situation couldn’t get any worse.
What we found there, instead, was a haunting presence. In fact, the clandestine invaders’ were nowhere to be found: the initial blanket-and clothing civilian relief had been transformed into a militarised operation that had the newly arrived transported to detention centres almost before they touched land. The only islanders who had direct contact with the migrants and asylum seekers were the fishermen at sea, and their visions differed greatly from the stories propagating through the popular press. This paradoxical situation of an ‘invisible invasion’ was the drive behind PARALLEL.
We interviewed a number of realities on this island of just over 6000 inhabitants, including the Associazione Alternativa Giovane – a youth group behind a local radio station and workshops in primary schools aimed at raising awareness on the migratory crisis amongst children and dispelling the media-propagated myths that had triggered a fear of ‘boogeymen’ throughout the island –, the parish priest who crossed the barbed-wire segregation of the detention centre on a weekly basis to observe mass, the vice-mayor, and the inhabitants who provided enormous insight into the heart of a place that had always somehow been ‘abandoned’ and ‘visited’ and was now being ordered to change its ways, particularly concerning rescues at sea. Our visit was bracketed by archival research calling on genres of fantasy travel and the shipwreck trope as well as utopian lands and languages, drawing attention to that space that separates Europe, Asia and Africa – the Mediterranean Sea. It looks at the island that appears in the first work of European proto-science-fiction – where Orlando Furioso famously defeated King Agramante – as well as that same place where escaped slave, Andrea Anfossi – as represented in a painting in the island’s chapel – found refuge. It exams the site of ‘twin grottoes’, historically providing spaces of worship for the different cults of those temporarily stopping over, in order to treat a contemporary phenomenon by shedding light on how an island (one of many) is connected to a global crisis situation via the multitude of people from different areas of the world and cultures, reaching its shores as a stepping stone to other desired destinations.
In 2009, we thought we had reached the island at the height of this predicament. In 2019, the situation in and across the Mediterranean and beyond, has worsened exponentially, revealing itself to be connected to a total global phenomenon that shows no sign of waning.
Book, digital print, 21 x 29.7 cm, 88 pp
Year: 2011
Exhibited at: Juntos Aparte, BienalSur, Cúcuta (CO), 2019 de sidere, La Place, Barcelona (ES), 2019 (photos Lucía Trouiller) Prendemi in cura da te, Superfluo project, Padua (I), 2013 Displacement Reactions, Di.st.urb, Scafati (I), 2013
for more images see mezomaro
