On the night of 18 April 2015, about 180 kilometres from the Italian island of Lampedusa, a fishing boat capsized with hundreds of migrants on board. Among the waves and beneath the ship’s 23-metre hull, 700 passengers who had dreamed of a better life drowned in the waters of the Mediterranean.
Last week that giant, rusty vessel arrived in Venice on the occasion of the city’s Biennale art festival, where it went on display on Saturday in an installation designed by the artist Christoph Büchel.
As a journalist working in Italy, I’ve seen the tragic results of the desperate and often doomed boat journeys by migrants across the Mediterranean. I watched the boat being towed along the Giudecca Canal last week, and I felt uneasy. Despite the good intentions of the artist and the event’s organisers – to raise public awareness of maritime tragedies involving migrants – I began to think that the boat might be in the wrong place.
Criticism quickly followed the wreck’s arrival, most prominently from the extreme rightwing League party, whose leader – Matteo Salvini, Italy’s deputy prime minister – has closed Italian ports to migrant rescue ships. For the League, all of this is “political propaganda” and a “manipulation”. It has proposed that the Biennale should transfer the wreck to Switzerland, Büchel’s homeland.
Büchel himself has declined to give interviews about the project, which is entitled Barca Nostra (Our Boat), but his collaborator, curator Maria Chiara di Trapani, says: “We are living in a tragic moment without memory. We all watch the news, and it seems so far away; someone is dead at sea and we change the channel.”
The physical presence of the boat, she says, might help change that. She hopes visitors to the Biennale “feel respect for it and look at it in silence – just give two minutes of silence to listen and reflect”.
I understand that point of view, but I remain uneasy – even though my politics are diametrically opposed to those of Salvini’s party.
The truth is that, despite Büchel’s good intentions, turning the commemoration of such tragedies into a spectacle risks diminishing – if not exploiting – the suffering associated with the migrant crisis. Even more so in this case, as the wreck in question is not just any boat: the story of its recovery has been a sensational one that has exposed a series of hypocrisies and failings along the way.
Lying 400 metres beneath the sea, the vessel was recovered by Italian authorities in 2016 on the authority of the then prime minister, Matteo Renzi. The recovery itself became a public spectacle, as an entire section of the Italian navy was engaged in the operation and work dragged on for months at a cost of €9.5m.
“It was our duty to give proper burial to our brothers and sisters who otherwise would have remained at the bottom of the sea,” said Renzi at an event on the day the boat was brought to the surface with almost 300 bodies trapped inside.
But with the commemorations over, in February 2017 Marco Minniti, the former interior minister from Renzi’s centre-left Democratic party, struck a deal with the Libyan coastguard that allowed it to start returning refugees to a country where aid agencies have reported incidents of torture and abuse.
As migrants were sent back to Libyan detention centres, and as men, women and children continued to die in the Mediterranean, in Italy a macabre tug-of-war played out among various institutions as to who would take control of the recovered wreck. Although no one seemed concerned about the migrants, the vessels on which they travelled were becoming the focus of dozens of people with “good intentions”.
Organisations requested that the boat be transferred to various Italian cities to be displayed in museums. In the end the city of Augusta in Sicily, where the recovery mission was based, obtained authorisation to receive the boat, with the assurance it would be used to create a monument in remembrance of the victims of the tragedy.
A few months ago the boat was given “on free and temporary loan” to Büchel for the Biennale. “It will speak to our conscience,” said Ralph Rugoff, the festival’s curator.
I am a staunch believer in the value of art as an instrument to stir the conscience and confront the establishment. Art has always performed this role, and it is right that it should continue to do so.
And yet I still have the feeling that displaying that wreck in such a purely artistic context – far from the institutions that were responsible for the tragedy or the communities that witness this kind of horror year in, year out – risks losing any sense of political denunciation, transforming it into a piece in which provocation prevails over the goal of sensitising the viewer’s mind.
Büchel’s decision risks creating yet another celebration of the nostalgia of tragedy without a corresponding act of conviction in the present; it is simply too distant from those towards whom its message should be directed.
I imagine throngs of people – well-dressed, sipping spritzes – in front of a boat that, to me, is a coffin which held 700 people. I imagine their gaze fixed on the boat’s faded paint, the same hue as the Venetian sky. I think about the 28 survivors of the sinking, and what they would have given for just one second of that attention.