While writing this post the civil rescue ship Sea-Watch 3 has entered Italian territorial waters and has stopped in front of the port of Lampedusa with 47 persons on board. The ship's crew rescued 65 people on May 15 from a rubber dinghy in distress about 30 nautical miles off the Libyan coast.
Last night, the Italian Coast Guard ordered and conducted the disembarkation of 18 women, children, and closely related men while the others, among them eight unaccompanied minors, a pregnant woman and a person with a disability, were left on board.
Conditions are rapidly deteriorating on board, but current Italian Minister for Interior Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini has irresponsibly announced Italy will keep its ports closed. In the meantime, the UN sent a letter to the Italian government criticizing the directives of the Interior Minister against NGO ships and asking to stop the Salvini securtiy decree as it violates the rights of migrants. Salvini, who just yesterday was once again waving rosary beads during an event in Milan with nationalists from across Europe in which they reasserted national sovereignty, answered by stating the UN make him laugh and advising them to take care of Venezuela instead.
Using religious symbols as if they were lucky charms (a behaviour you would expect from mafiosi but not from a minister…) and ignoring the message of the gospel, Salvini keeps on using migrants for his political campaigns, lying as he reassures voters there are no more deaths in the Mediterranean Sea, which is completely untrue. In the meantime, vulnerable people are kept hostage at sea, becoming human pawns in a horrid game of politics.
At the 58th International Art Exhibition in Venice there is something that Salvini and many other fascist and racist ministers in the current Italian government should see, an installation entitled "Barca Nostra" (Our Boat).
The large vessel covered in rust and with large holes in its sides is not an installation (it is therefore different from Vik Muniz's "Lampedusa", a floating installation launched five years ago during the Venice Biennale to prompt visitors to think about migrant drowning in the Mediterranean), but a real boat involved in the Mediterranean's deadliest shipwreck in living memory.
It occurred in April 2015 in the Sicilian Channel, 96 km off the Libyan coast and 193 km south of the Italian island of Lampedusa in international waters. The fishing boat, which would normally have a crew of fifteen men, was carrying an average of five persons per square meter, with migrants locked up as the ship's ballast in the hold and machine room. The vessel collided with a Portuguese freighter that was trying to save it, and the boat tragically sank with its imprisoned human cargo. There were only 28 survivors, and between 700 and 1100 people were presumed missing.
At the time of the shipwreck the European Union was implementing Operation Triton, with the aim of maintaining the European border in the Mediterranean, exclusively within the 30-mile limit from the European coasts. Following the European Union's decision to end Operation Mare Nostrum, the rescue of boats in distress, previously at the expense of Italy and the European Union, was left to the normal rules of navigation, which impose on any type of ship closer the task of providing assistance to those in difficulty.
In June 2016, the shipwreck was recovered from the seabed by the Italian Navy (Marina Militare) and transported to the Pontile Marina Militare di Melilli (NATO) near Augusta, Sicily. Removal and identification of the hundreds of bodies still imprisoned within its hull began with an operation that involved hundreds of professionals and volunteers, including personnel of the Italian Navy, the Fire Brigade, the Italian Red Cross, forensic pathologists, and personnel of several Italian universities, as well as national and local authorities.
The removal operations and the investigations about the deceased closed in 2017, at a total cost of 23 million euros. Since then the wreck was left in the refueling station of the NATO, the Italian Navy base of Melilli, in the meantime Italy's previous Prime Minister Matteo Renzi proposed bringing the shipwreck to Brussels as a warning about the tragedy of migration, while the Laboratorio di Antropologia e Odontologia Forense at the University of Milan, asked to turn the relic into a Human Rights Museum in the Milanese Città Studi.
Last May 2018, a migrant initiative in Palermo started a cultural petition to claim the recovered shipwreck in a symbolic and political appropriation act, proposing a European procession with the shipwreck - similar to the Santa Rosalia procession in Palermo, in which a ship that initially brought plague to the city symbolizes the triumph of life over death. None of the proposals ever came to fruition.
In April 2019 the boat was finally released by the Italian Presidency of the Council of Ministers and the Italian Ministry of Defense, to be handed over to the Comune of Augusta through the project Barca Nostra, by Swiss artist Christoph Büchel. The boat was allowed to leave the NATO Base in Melilli for Venice, a city believed to have been founded by fleeing refugees.
For the duration of the 58th International Art Exhibition in Venice, the vessel will stand at the historic Arsenale, the site where ships for cultural and religious wars (among them the Battle of Lepanto led by the Catholic 'Holy League’ of the Venetian Republic and Spanish Empire, against the expansion of the Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean) were produced, in a symbolic act.
The decision to display the vessel was a contentious one: Barca Nostra was not accompanied by very visible explanatory materials and people passing by were taking selfies in front of it, using it as a curious old relic from the port of Venice, while it is actually an immensely tragic backdrop.
Besides, the wreck is on display in front of one of the Arsenale sandwich bars, and this position wasn't deemed as very respectful to the people who lost their lives in the boat, that could be conceived as an empty coffin.
Yet that was probably the best position as visitors are confronted by the tragedy and are prompted to think about migrants left stranded at sea. Some critics will say it was inopportune to showcase it during an art event as it is not art, but "Barca Nostra" is a topical symbol of the "interesting times" (the theme of this year's Biennale) we are living in. It is after all a dramatic monument to migration that highlights modern inequalities and reminds us that not all people are allowed to move freely in this world, while pointing at the consequences of unfair policies and politics.
So maybe yes, Barca Nostra should definitely be at the Biennale, even though the people who should have seen it weren't there on the opening days. Italian representatives of the government usually visit the press days, but Salvini & Co. weren't around when the Biennale opened two weeks ago. That was an absolute shame because being confronted by an immensely appalling horror may have deeply changed them.
Yet Barca Nostra is at the Biennale until November 24th, so there will be plenty of chances for many politicians out there to be confronted by tragedy, become more human and maybe start working on real and better plans to tackle migration.
Comments