Abstract
The cultural politics of the present encourage museums and artists to seek an ethical vision within Europe navigating the knowledge of ongoing mass death at the border. This is one explanation for the interest in objects symbolising present-day irregular border crossing among museum curators, artists, designers and activists. Wooden fishing boats, inflatable dinghies and life jackets appear regularly in exhibitions and installations. This chapter focuses on the meaning of “the Lampedusa boat” and argues that the narrative context within which the boats are exhibited guides the work of imagination that animates the object. While exhibiting the boats carries the critical potential to relocate the border and make it visible, this potential is disrupted by a political context that simultaneously militarises and humanitarianises the border.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, the Lampedusan activist collective Askavusa presents a collection of life vests and hypothermia foils at the “anti-museum” PortoM; Timo Wright’s installation Kharon displayed a pile of life vests from Lesbos at the Anhava Gallery, Helsinki, 2016; Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei has created multiple installations of Lesbos life vests, such as the one at the Konzerthaus in Berlin, 2016; two children’s life vests were on display in a glass vitrine in the exhibition Violence and Gender at the Bundeswehr Museum of Military History in Dresden, 2018; the civil rescue operation Sea Watch exhibited a pile of life vests in a rubber dinghy during an anti-racist parade in Hamburg, 29 September 2018; and in 2019 Venice Biennale exhibited a wrecked ship in which 700–1100 people had died on 18 April 2015 as installation Barca Nostra. The earliest examples I have found of “migrant boats” on display in Europe were a West African boat used on the catwalk during Antonio Miro’s fall-winter 2007/2008 show during Barcelona Fashion Week and Kalliopi Lemos’s installation At Crossroads, made of boats collected from Chios, Greece, and exhibited at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin in 2009 during the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
- 2.
Perera reports that there were 67 on board, while Leenders and May (2017) indicate 60 people.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Kim Tao, Giovanna Rocchi, Teun Castelein and the three anonymous Malian men for sharing their experience. I am also grateful for Gianluca Gatta, Randi Marselis and Klaus Neumann for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter.
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Horsti, K. (2019). Curating Objects from the European Border Zone: The “Lampedusa Refugee Boat”. In: Horsti, K. (eds) The Politics of Public Memories of Forced Migration and Bordering in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30565-9_4
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