A boat’s afterlife: multiple translations of migratory debris

Abstract

Over the past decade, images of boats crossing or sinking in the Mediterranean have become extremely familiar to European publics. What is less familiar is the processes through which those boats are re-purposed, becoming artistic or even commodified goods once they reach a port of landing. Caught between being considered waste and valuable objects, these debris have been moved and re-purposed with scarce acknowledgement of the political work that these practices perform. This paper argues that practices of translation transform objects into waste or valuables and reveal crucial fault lines in the politics of migration – such as the limits of a politics of posthumous commemoration and the de-politicisation of border deaths. Translation works through a wide variety of professional practices and the assembling of value, which informs the staging of materials as waste or as valuables. By analysing the case of the art installation Barca Nostra, this article rethinks the role of migratory debris and the multiplicity of meaning attributed to them by highlighting how they must be read simultaneously as waste and objects of value to fully understand how practices of translation contribute to the de-politicisation of border deaths, leaving state violence in the Mediterranean unchallenged.

Introduction

Migratory movement is an intrinsically material process. It works through bodies as well as objects and infrastructure that both enable movement and hinder it (Pallister-Wilkins, 2022; Squire, 2015; Walters, 2015). In particular, the passage of people forced into dangerous or illegalised routes often leaves behind traces (Hamilakis, 2017; Soto, 2018; Sundberg, 2008). These are not only mundane items and personal belongings but also objects which have come to be closely associated with migration across harsh environments, for instance, black water bottles in the Sonoran desert (Squire, 2014) or orange life vests in the Mediterranean sea (Wagner Tsoni, 2020). Such debris is understood as both waste littering public spaces and materials rife for re-use and re-purposing (Wagner Tsoni, 2020). Many initiatives seek to give these materials new life by converting them into other objects (Mora-Gámez, 2020), into souvenirs for tourists and objects of worship (Kushner, 2016), or even into displays in museums and art exhibitions (Gatta, 2016; Zucconi, 2019).

In so doing, material debris become part of a public conversation on the issue of migration in often surprising and contradictory ways. The varying attribution of value to these objects (from none to incalculable cultural and historical import) has been shown to support a number of political practices, spanning from the production of the category of the ‘human’ (Squire, 2014) to the reconfiguration of notions of belonging (Soto, 2018; Sundberg, 2008; Wagner Tsoni, 2020). However, their status as objects of value which deserve to be displayed and are fully ‘in place’ in public space is often contested and subject to change. Such is the case of the art installation Barca Nostra, exhibited in 2019 at the Venice Biennale. This artwork, a ready-made piece composed of the wreck of a fishing vessel involved in one of the deadliest shipwrecks in the Mediterranean to date, has undergone a wide number of transformations from a vessel to forensic evidence, to waste before being converted into a piece of art on display. At each point in the time of its afterlife, its status remains open to dispute, as actors question the univocality of its value, demonstrating the complexity which underlies the transformation of a vessel sunk in the Mediterranean into a work of art worthy of display.

The open debates about the value, the rightful role and appropriateness for display of this object provide an interesting entry point into particular political processes which govern the management of migration and the justification of policies which result in border deaths. As actors claim ownership of the wreck and imbue or empty it of value, they also re-produce particular political framings which shape political discourses on migration. While a significant amount of literature in International Relations has discussed the materiality of migration, or the importance of artistic displays, material culture and the circulation of everyday objects to the study of international politics (Bide, 2021; Callahan, 2020; Danchev, 2009; Harman, 2019; Sylvester, 2015), little attention has been paid to the processes which turn material debris into waste or art.

More precisely, while a burgeoning interdisciplinary literature (Soto, 2018; Squire, 2014; Sundberg, 2008; Wagner Tsoni, 2020) has tackled the political importance of migratory debris, there has been scarce engagement with the processes through which mundane objects are transformed from waste to art and vice versa. This gap is important for two interconnected reasons. First, migratory debris are not univocally one or the other, but they become imbued with particular meanings through their movement across particular spaces and their relations to particular social formations. Actors are purposefully engaged in these transformations, and their varying attribution of value reveals much about the political stakes they attribute to the treatment of migratory debris and to migration itself. Second, this in turn has consequences for how these objects intervene in public debate. Indeed, the attribution of particular values to objects re-produce those understandings of migration and its politics through their display or lack thereof (Bide, 2021; Sylvester, 2020).

In the case of Barca Nostra, each of its translations from waste, to forensic evidence, to art contributes in different ways to the de-politicisation of border deaths, even as the boat itself physically represents the horror of border violence. As such, this paper highlights how familiar political frames for understanding migration are re-instated and re-produced by these various engagements in localised and situated ways. In so doing, this article demonstrates the complexity of the afterlives of objects in movement, and how much political work, and contestation, goes into presenting them as coherent agents of a particular story of migration. In other words, as actors imbue or empty debris of value, they reveal the social and political ordering which guide their understanding of migration. Debris in turn becomes a vehicle and a point of re-production of these same understandings through their display or disappearance.

In this paper, I first argue that the recovery of the sunken boat in summer 2016 depended on the drive to use the boat as a political symbol to generate outrage about border deaths, even as the same incident was also used to further drive border externalisation, shifting the responsibility for border deaths away from European Union (EU) border policies. Second, my argument will move on to analyse how the boat entered a techno-scientific assemblage as it became part of the forensic investigation aimed at identifying the victims of the shipwreck. Even as the boat was formally a piece of evidence and therefore valuable, the insistence on the responsibility of the ‘smugglers’ diverted attention from the structural dynamics of death in the Mediterranean and thus emptied the boat of true evidential value. Finally, this paper will describe how the boat became formally a piece of Italian heritage in light of its ‘cultural value’ and was exhibited at the Venice Biennale with the name Barca Nostra. Regardless of its status as heritage however, it always also remains a ‘coffin’ which is unfit for display in public space as public debate on its exhibition testifies. As such, in order for Barca Nostra to be at the centre of these conversions of value, it needs to be simultaneously legible as both disposable and valuable, both displayable and inappropriate for view. These varying attributions of value not only depend on the constellation of actors and spaces in which the boat is immersed but also reveal how the boat becomes a vehicle of certain understandings of the politics of migration and border deaths, becoming a salient point of entry in their analysis.

Migratory debris and the politics of migration

The materiality of migration has long become part of studies on the topic. Scholarly focus has extensively covered infrastructure which allows movement (Walters, 2015; Walters et al., 2022), shapes it in the form of ecological or man-made barriers (or both) (Dickson, 2021; Heller et al., 2017; Pallister-Wilkins, 2022; Squire, 2015) or finally seeks to control it (Glouftsios and Scheel, 2021; Pollozek and Passoth, 2019). Other strands of literature have also highlighted how lives lived in movement rely on informal, alternative infrastructures (Mora-Gámez, 2020; Trimikliniotis et al., 2016), and how the same technologies and materials used against the movement of people can also be used to support it (Heller et al., 2017; Noori, 2020).

Each of these interventions have shown how migration is a process thickly populated by things, technologies and materials, some more mundane than others, and how each of those can be at times weaponised or used to support people’s desire to move. Materials in these cases are part of lively or dangerous human and non-human ecologies which participate to hinder or enable movement in a variety of different ways. Although their use might be subversive or fallible, none of the material elements which make up surveillance apparatuses, data-sharing infrastructures, vehicles or routes ever come close to being purposeless or labelled as waste, at least not until they have reached what archaeologists call their ‘afterlife’ (Soto, 2018, p. 461). That is to say that moment in which objects cannot perform their original utilitarian function and should be disposed of.

It is once the debris of migration enter their afterlife and are perceived as purposeless that they can be made into waste or be converted into other types of objects. So long as boats remain in use as vehicles, in their proper locations and spaces (i.e. at sea), there is no question of them being transformed into other objects. It is when they are taken to shore that they can, for instance, be re-made into Christian crosses or other types of artefacts (Kushner, 2016). It is in the gaps opened by the loss of those objects by their original owners, their wear and tear or their impending destruction, that they turn into waste and/or are re-purposed for a new life. That is why in this paper, I am not looking at Barca Nostra as a vehicle, as a living tool of movement, rather, I am looking to its afterlife. In particular, I look at the ways in which, beyond its initial purpose, which had been served and arguably failed on its sinking, the boat has come to take on a variety of roles and meanings.

A focus on sites and objects beyond the immediate act of governance or resistance is not new among students of International Relations. Recent scholarship in International Relations has successfully included forms of artistic representation and visual culture into the study of international politics. Scholars have long recognised that unexpected sites and relations, such as curational practices in museums; the production of visual artefacts such as films, paintings and pictures; and varied art installations are prime locations and methods for the study of international political dynamics (Callahan, 2020; Danchev, 2009; Harman, 2019). Whether studies are concerned with how representations shape social and political worlds (Bleiker, 2001), or how art and museums stand as instances and enactments of international politics (Sylvester, 2015), they all share an interest in analysing the role that cultural artefacts play in international affairs.

Christine Sylvester (2015), for instance, has effectively shown how museum institutions themselves play important roles in the construction of national publics and consciousness, as well as being rightful actors themselves in the theatre of International Relations. In her study of major fine arts museums, she describes how international institutions such as the British Museum perform international politics by displaying and curating exhibitions which serve nation-building purposes and perform imperial politics. However, it is not only museum institutions which are key actors in the circulation of narratives and political meaning through art, installations and material culture. In her analysis of war memory and war experience, Sylvester also highlights how different actors can become a party of the curation of memory of war and as such affect the narratives through which conflict is remembered and understood. It is not only curators, artists or so-called experts who shape how objects and sites tell stories about politics and International Relations, but also the publics who interact with such displays. For instance, in her study of both the Arlington National Cemetery and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Sylvester (2018, 2020) reveals how families of veterans and visitors have contributed to re-shaping these spaces by producing assemblages of ordinary objects (pictures, cards, letters). Those not only materially restructure the space and shape of the memorial but also reveal both the suffering effaced by militarist narratives and the stretching boundaries of war experience beyond the battlefield.

A similar emphasis on everyday objects can be found in Bide (2021) where the space of the museum becomes home of textile and fashion objects which are used to testify how war experience is emotionally negotiated beyond the temporal boundaries of war and peace. In her analysis of clothes displayed at the Museum of London, the wear and tear as well as the circulation of the clothes tell stories about the aftereffects of war and the ways in which people make sense and negotiate their experience of violence. The continued use of wartime textiles after the war and their adaptation to new forms of life reveals traces of the agency of people in fraught times. Mending of clothes, re-use of fabric or adaptation of style beyond the strict codes which regulated the production of civilian clothing during the war speak to the experience of loss and hardship which persisted after the war, or attempts to move on by adapting to a perceived new age. In such a way, the transformations which these clothes underwent, together with their curation in the museum space, highlight the ways in which materials become vehicles of social and political meanings.

This emphasis on the stories that the movement of objects and their wear and tear can tell are very close to the heart of this paper. However, the story of Barca Nostra is not one that can be comfortably told only within the boundaries of the exhibition space of the Venice Biennale. This trajectory is not exceptional. Indeed, migratory debris are not only found in museums or exhibitions, rather they also populate dumps, beaches, forensic laboratories and morgues. A burgeoning interdisciplinary literature has successfully shown how everyday things play a crucial role in shaping the social and political worlds of borderlands in many guises. A variety of disciplines and perspectives, primarily geography, archaeology and anthropology, has tackled the ‘afterlives’ of materials in borderlands. Across aims and interests, these studies all share an awareness of the roles traces play in the politics of migration not only by producing alterity and geopolitical boundaries (Sundberg, 2008; Wagner Tsoni, 2020), but also by fostering moments of empathy and recognition (Soto, 2018; Squire, 2014).

In particular, scholars have focused on the ways in which engagements with these objects by actors who are not migrants reveal much about geopolitical identity formations, understandings of what is socially unacceptable and how these orderings can be contested. Sundberg (2008), for instance, shows how, by organising trash pick-ups in the Sonoran desert, humanitarian groups effectively enact objects left behind by migrants as trash, simultaneously affirming both their standing as good citizens who are good stewards of the natural environment and the less-than-civilised character of mobile people, who cannot be trusted not to litter. In this myopic view of objects carried in transit, which are usually abandoned to ensure survival or escape detection, the moniker of ‘trash’ serves to underpin not only a geopolitical boundary between citizens and non-citizens but also justifies it in terms of social ‘inappropriateness’. In doing so, the influence of violent border policies, which determine the dispersal of such materials in order to ensure their survival, is obscured.

Similarly, Squire (2014) discusses how it is not only belonging that is articulated through the determination of the value of those objects but also varying conceptions of the human. In this sense, the recognition of those objects as ‘personal belongings’ rather than waste poses a challenge to the de-humanisation of mobile people (Squire, 2014: 19). Therefore, while the removal of these objects from the spaces where they are discarded is a further erasure of the geopolitical violence which shaped their owners’ journey, their recovery and artistic curation has the potential to overthrow these orderings, by valuing the objects’ ‘afterlife’ (Soto, 2018) and becoming proof of the harshness of borderlands (Squire, 2017).

Focusing on object’s afterlives and their capacity to witness to their owner’s passage, these analyses point to the ways in which traces perform crucial political roles by being complicit with or revealing the violent politics of the borderland. As trash, objects serve the purpose of further de-humanising mobile people and obscuring the determinants of border violence; as art, they have the potential to contest de-humanization and re-politicise border deaths. Yet this literature pays little attention to the processes through which they are transformed from waste into art and vice versa. Furthermore, it does not engage with the situatedness of these processes, which are anything but univocal or straightforward, as the case of Barca Nostra testifies. It is at this point that borrowing some methodological and conceptual tools from approaches within and outside of International Relations which focus on a sociology of translation (Allan, 2017; Barry, 2013; Berger and Esguerra, 2018; Best and Walters, 2013; Bueger, 2015; Callon, 1984; Law, 1999) becomes particularly helpful.

Michel Callon (1984: 203), in his seminal paper on the attempts of French marine biologists to employ particular conservation strategies on the scallop population of St Brieuc Bay, defines translation as a process ‘during which the identity of actors, the possibility of interaction and the possibility of manoeuvre are negotiated and delimited’. In other words, processes of translation can be represented as the attempt to fix actors’ identities and roles by the establishment of practices or devices which materialise these identities and perform them. To paraphrase John Law’s (1999: 4) use of the concept, employing a sociology of translation means to adopt the lenses of a semiotics of materiality, whereby relations are what defines objects, actors and their roles, even as those relations are unstable, unfixed and therefore must be performed in order to be maintained in practice.

These processes then are far from univocal, but are part of a wealth of concurring and even competing attempts to ‘enrol’ actors in particular webs of relations (Callon, 1984). How to navigate across this multiplicity of processes? Latour (2007) suggests to pay attention to controversies, that is to say, moments when competing understandings of an object or an event come into contact with each other and sense must be made of their difference. Annemarie Mol (2002) makes a similar point, choosing to focus on the making of coherence across multiplicity and complexity. In her analysis of the study and treatment of multiple sclerosis, she highlights how different diagnostic techniques not only reach different conclusions about the disease but also give extremely different descriptions of what the disease looks like in practice. Across this multiplicity of approaches to the definition and assessment of multiple sclerosis, the disease never fragments into a completely separate array of techniques and practices even when different techniques yield extremely different results. Rather, efforts must be made to produce the disease and each patient’s body as a coherent entity. This process which she calls coordination, and of which translation might be an attempt, serves the purpose of making a tentative order out of the complexity of the disease and to arbitrate between ‘controversies’ emerging out of different diagnostic techniques.

These approaches provide scholars with a language to describe how the roles and meaning of materials emerge in practice, relationally, and are never given. Furthermore, these relations, and their effects are complex or multiple, often leading to controversies which then need to be ‘coordinated’ in order for a tentative working order to emerge. This however does not mean that multiple orders cannot be produced simultaneously or across distances. Anna Tsing (2015), in her work on the value chains of matsutake mushrooms, shows how goods move from one milieu (in her words ‘patches’) to another, in other words from the assemblage in which it is produced to the ultimate place of distribution, while also changing in meaning and social function. In her work, translation is not only the assembling of meaning through relations but also the assembling of value and the transformation of goods across contexts.

From the camps of South East Asian groups in US national parks to distributors in Japan, passing through the inventory and shipping processes of other middle-man companies, matsutake mushrooms become a symbol of a life of freedom from formal capitalist economies, a marketable commodity and ultimately a valuable symbol of affluence and respect in a gift economy. In these transformations, value is amassed and converted as well. While the mushrooms for pickers are the result of a life lived at the edges of a capitalist society relying only on their own skills and knowledge of the terrain, as they move along the value chain, they become translated into inventoried goods which then can be assigned a monetary value. Similarly, after being packaged and shipped as labelled bundles identifiable by a bar-code, they arrive in Japan, where their value is not primarily monetary but instead fruit of a complex gift of economy which responds to social relations and practices, and not to capitalist logics of value accumulation. As the mushroom moves from its harvesting site to its site of consumption, it not only changes value but also performs different social functions as a result of the webs of relations in which it is enmeshed, fading in and out of capitalist logics of accumulation, and playing a part in performing those same ‘orderings’ and relations.

In the context of migratory debris, this means that the production of their meaning can be traced by ‘following the actors’ or, in the case of this paper, the boat of the April 2015 shipwreck in order to analyse how the web of relations in which it is immersed shapes its meanings. This includes not only its relationship to other actors, in terms of stewardship, ownership or use, but also its relation to the locations in which it is enmeshed: military bases, forensic environments and the exhibition space of the Venice Biennale. The relations which emerge and ‘assemble’ this boat as a symbol of migration and death in the Mediterranean also assemble the identities and roles of other actors’ involved in the greater context of migration (migrants, the state of Italy, border enforcement, the sea) and the political dynamics surrounding death. By tracing the various controversies, or attempts to fix and transform the meaning of the boat, one can highlight the competing attributions of value which underscore its transformation from waste, to body of proof, to a work of art. These transformations not only transform the meaning of the boat but also have consequences for the identity and meanings attributed to border deaths and the political apparatuses of bordering which produce them or are intended to stop them.

The Barca Nostra installation emerged out of the sea depths as a symbol of Italy’s humanitarian goodwill, even as it testified to the failure of European migration policies. It later became evidence in a forensic investigation, alternatively worthy of care, worthless and monstrous, as practitioners had to grapple with its cargo of corpses, torn between the affirmation of this incident as independent of border policies and the evidence of border violence. Finally, even as the boat took on the role of a heritage art object, it sat awkwardly in a space of exhibition as various actors debated its fitness for public display. Translation as such is intended to describe exactly this material and ideational process of movement which not only gathers different actors about things but also entirely reshapes their meaning.

The following sections will give an overview of the turning points in the trajectory which brought the boat of 28 April 2015 from the shores of Libya to those of the Venice pier. The instances chosen represent moments when the boat is moved and transformed into a different kind of object. As such, I will discuss the decision to recover the wreck from the bottom of the Mediterranean sea, its treatment as a piece of evidence during forensic investigation in the NATO pier of Melilli and finally the debates surrounding its exhibition at the Venice Biennale. The sources used to give an overview of these events and provide some insights in the rationales and practices actors put forward to deal with the cumbersome presence of this boat are varied. I have taken into account press conferences, minutes of meetings of local authorities, autobiographical re-tellings of these initiatives by the actors involved, ministerial memoranda of understanding, the Venice Biennale catalogue and press coverage of the events at the time. This eclectic collection of sources was analysed thematically, paying attention to how actors described the value and purpose of the boat and to what those determinations reveal about the meanings they ascribe to border violence and to the policing of the border.

Evidence of no crime: the recovery and forensic analysis of the wreck

On 18 April 2015, a fishing ship capsized off the coast of Libya, drowning almost all its passengers. Survivors’ accounts told of a number of roughly 1,000 people travelling on that vessel, and still today, this shipwreck is the single incident recorded with the most casualties in the Mediterranean. The boat, which had been overcrowded with passengers, launched a distress call once in international waters and was reached by a mercantile vessel in the vicinity which attempted to carry out a rescue operation. However, the two boats collided, and the fishing vessel capsized and sank quickly after impact (Heller and Pezzani, n.d.). After the shipwreck, Italian authorities dispatched Navy and Coast Guard personnel to search for survivors and recover the bodies, but only 26 people were recovered alive, among which was the ship captain, who was later charged and condemned for human trafficking (Camilli, 2016). In the midst of popular outrage for this tragedy, the Italian Prime Minister at the time, Matteo Renzi, announced that he intended to arrange for the wreck to be recovered and with it all the bodies of the victims so they could be buried (Palazzo Chigi, 2015). It was the first and only time that a similar operation would be ordered and carried out in the Mediterranean by a state authority.

In the press conference announcing the recovery of the wreck, Renzi denied the role that the interruption of search and rescue operations at sea had in the determination of such deaths (Palazzo Chigi, 2015). The shipwreck, he claimed, did happen in the presence of search and rescue activities (in the form of a commercial vessel) and yet, it proved to be deadly anyway. This instance was used to justify more broadly the interruption of operations such as Mare Nostrum, ¹ and to move the border policy discourse of Europe towards more externalisation policies. This was part of a slow drive from border management at sea in the form of humanitarian search and rescue operations, which nevertheless sustained exclusionary border policies or the subordinated inclusion of migrants in European spaces (Cuttitta, 2018), to more openly securitarian border policing framework (Mirto, 2019). The latter form of border policing, which was exemplified by the operation Triton, put much more emphasis on the policing of the space of the sea, the contrasting of trafficking and the capture of smugglers than the saving of lives.

The role that the interruption of state-led rescue missions by the EU has had in the increasing number of border deaths since 2015 has been extensively analysed by activist and academic reports. In particular, Heller and Pezzani (n.d.) in the scope of the project Forensic Oceanography have argued that the choice of ending Mare Nostrum in favour of Triton was based on the incorrect assumption that this would prove a deterrent to migrant crossings, while even Frontex’s own internal assessment determined this policy likely to result in an increase in border deaths. Effectively, EU border policies of retrenching rescue operations at sea contributed directly to border deaths. The political responsibility of European policy choices however does not figure in debates on this particular shipwreck or any other.

This is compatible with other studies of border policies which work through deterrence or the funnelling of migratory routes through dangerous natural terrains (Pezzani and Heller, 2013; Squire, 2017; Stewart et al., 2016). In ‘governing migration through death’ (Squire, 2017: 517), states do not actively mete out violence in order to discourage human movement, but instead choose to push that very movement through terrains which prove deadly. Producing the sea as a ‘natural’ barrier masks the cynicism of border enforcement policies (Dickson, 2021; Squire, 2017). Consider the following sentence from the same press conference: ‘It’s natural, in the case of such tragedies, the sea is a fickle beast. Our issue is [. . .] stopping human trafficking’ (Palazzo Chigi, 2015, my translation). This affirmation posits the Mediterranean as a naturally dangerous space and, along with the emphasis on human trafficking, testified by the quick apprehension of one of the survivors, immediately denies any political responsibility for the conditions which render violence so pervasive (Little and Vaughan-Williams, 2017).

This makes it so that European authorities can present themselves as in no way responsible for the violence which keeps recurring in the Mediterranean and effectively push the blame on the ‘ruthless smugglers who overcrowded the unseaworthy boats to the point of collapse’ (Heller and Pezzani, n.d.). In this vacuum of political responsibility, policy responses to border deaths can continue on the same technocratic trajectory, normalising border death and responding to it by implementing further policing of the sea (Cuttitta and Last, 2019) or even through the effective attempt to stop boats from leaving the southern shores of the Mediterranean through border externalisation (Palazzo Chigi, 2015). These efforts effectively de-politicise the occurrence of border deaths, even as it gains great visibility on the political scene.

As such, the recovery of the wrecked boat displaces investigation in the dynamics of border deaths and the attribution of wider responsibility to EU states. It represents Italy acting in accordance with its purported ‘values of human dignity’, which are a crucial part of its culture and its ‘civilization’ (Palazzo Chigi, 2015, my translation). Moreover, it plays an important role in fixing Italy’s role as a humanitarian actor in the Mediterranean and as morally superior, set apart from other European countries. In other statements on the issue, Renzi accused other EU member states of being content to let the wreck remain out of sight as a way of assuaging their guilty conscience:

I believe it is impossible for anyone, even for my fellow European leaders, to think we can keep that boat hidden from view. Europe’s conscience does not sit 380 meters below the sea level and that is why we will grant a burial to those sisters and brothers who died at sea. (SkyTG24, 2015, my translation)

The impossibility of attributing responsibility for border deaths beyond the shifting of blame onto supposed smugglers emerges even more clearly when taking into account the transformation of the boat from a political symbol of Italy’s humanitarian commitments to a piece of evidence. When the time came for the boat to be recovered and the bodies to be buried, several governmental bodies were involved along with military resources and personnel. In particular, the involvement of the Special Office for Missing People, a special branch of the Ministry of the Interior, shifted the focus of operations from the recovery of the wreck to a more technical effort for the identification of the victims of the shipwreck.

The boat was transported to a NATO pier in Sicily, where a complex infrastructure had been set up to allow for the retrieval of the bodies, together with their forensic analysis and their processing for burial. This operation took months and resulted in the wreck being treated as a crime scene. As such, the wreck formally became evidence in an investigation under the purview of the local Sicilian prosecution. Every technical intervention on its husk had to be approved by the public prosecution (Cattaneo, 2018). However, as far as the prosecution was concerned, the case opened for the shipwreck of 18 April 2015 had been formally closed with the arrest of the boat captain, who was charged with smuggling and murder. The wreck was thus useless to the prosecution. Since the wreck’s role was limited to being a shelter to the remaining bodies only until they could be retrieved, after that point, the boat would be destroyed according to the local waste disposal procedures (WebmarteTV, 2016, my translation). The same process which made the wreck valuable as a political symbol of Italy’s commitment to human dignity and re-produced the de-politicisation of border deaths also made it disposable, as the insistence on the sole criminal responsibility of the smugglers emptied the wreck of any power as evidence of structural border violence.

Yet, the unprecedented volume of death and decay which the boat held made operators involved in its unloading doubly concerned, both about its preservation and the necessity of its immediate disposal. Both media coverage and practitioner’s accounts of the operations stressed both the lack of a biological health hazard arising from the boat and the necessity to implement stringent measures to nullify any remaining risk. Local news coverage in the days preceding the recovery of the wreck stresses the lack of biological risk for the local population, although the security measures being implemented were those suitable for the treatment of nuclear, biological, chemical and radiological risk interventions (Casoli, 2016; Pupia TV, 2016).

The exceptionality of the wreck and its embeddedness into a context ruled by scientific, stringent standard operational procedures transformed it into a biohazard requiring specialist procedures and risk-assessments, whose disposal needed to be immediately ordained as soon as its purpose as temporary container had been served. The repulsion it generated into local populations remained even when actions were taken to re-purpose the wreck from a dirty but unavoidable container into a resource for local cultural heritage, almost haunting any debate with regard to not only its monetary value but also its appropriateness as an object publicly displayed (Comune di Augusta, 2019c). In this sense, the meaning attached to the boat was shaped in equal parts by the intentions which animated its recovery and by the pragmatic procedural logics of forensic investigation, which, although the boat could not offer any relevant proof to a case already closed, remained the only effective method to carry out the operation.

As the boat moved from the seabed to the pier, it served particular purposes in effacing the reality of violence in the Mediterranean, even as its sheer horror testified to the same. The symbolic value of the boat and its reading as waste intersects with the production of the lives it carried as both valuable ‘brothers and sisters’ (Palazzo Chigi, 2015) and ‘wasted lives’ (Bauman, 2014). At the intersection between these opposed understanding lies not only the possibility of connection and translation from one to the other but also their very condition of possibility. As the wreck is made valuable in the scope of Renzi’s attempt to seemingly redress the injustice of border violence, its recovery is firmly embedded in discourses which de-politicise border deaths and justify further border controls and border externalisations, without unpacking the role these policies play in determining the fates of shipwrecked people. Those same understandings of border deaths as entirely unrelated to EU migration management policies but only as a result of smuggler’s cruelty also then empties the wreck of any power as evidence of border violence determining its plans for destruction. The wreck then only has a utilitarian value insofar as it holds those bodies. Beyond that, it is waste, needing to be quarantined and managed as a potentially dangerous biological hazard and as such calling for immediate disposal.

The next section will show how, even as the wreck was emptied of forensic evidential value and thus destined for destruction, interested parties made efforts to transform it once again from waste into an art object and ultimately display it. This process of translation from evidence/waste into art imbues the wreck with incalculable value as a memorial and a historical marker; however, this attribution of value depends on rather than re-frames the (only) moral engagement with border death, displacing political debates about its causes. As the boat is displayed, it raises concerns and prompts debate not about border violence but rather about its own appropriateness as a public display.

Barca Nostra: the afterlife of a wreck with no name

Six years after its recovery, the wreck of the shipwreck of 18 April 2015 has still not been destroyed. Rather, it has become a valuable prize that local and national administrations have fought over and an art installation at the Venice Biennale in 2019. In 2016, once the wreck laid empty in the piers and the bodies had been dispatched to local cemeteries, its husk did not seem purposeless or in need of decontamination and destruction. Rather, already at the end of forensic investigations on the wreck, there was a certain uneasiness with the idea that the boat would be disposed of and made to disappear (Cattaneo, 2018). It was considered a symbol too powerful of the continuous resurgence of death in the Mediterranean to be abandoned to its fate. ² Its haunting violence, which made it dangerous and a potential biological hazard in the scope of forensic investigation, transformed it into a valuable reminder and a historical legacy.

In this context, the wreck ceases to be either strictly a body of evidence or waste, it is transformed into an artefact of cultural value and a symbol of public memory. As the wreck takes on the form of an object with cultural and historical importance, it needs to be re-purposed in other spaces and curated in other ways. This implies its movement to places of display along with its transformation into an object which not only has a moral or cultural value but which is also inserted in circuits of property exchange and lease. Initially, the wreck was supposed to be part of a museum in Milan sponsored by members of its University, and the Italian Government dedicated 600,000 euros in its budget to support the cause (Rappresentanze Sindacali Unitarie (RSU), 2017). Later, due to pressures of the Municipality of Augusta (Sicily), where the wreck had been stationed since the beginning, it was donated to later become part of a Garden of Memory.

It is interesting to note exactly why it was so important to the Municipality of Augusta to take possession of this symbol. Taking possession of the boat and building a Garden of Memory around it was understood as an achievement for the municipality on two main counts. On one hand, the acquisition of the boat was considered to be a good investment, given that it would ‘enrich the city’s museum heritage, and the cultural wealth of the entire region, as the principal landmark of the “Garden of Memory” created to mark and stand witness to the tragedy of migrating people’ (Comune di Augusta, 2018). On the other, it would finally provide visibility and the recognition of Augusta as a key location in the migration crisis, which had been until that time overshadowed by coverage of Lampedusa, sparking resentment. According to the Mayor at the time, who in November 2016 wrote to the national government to argue the case of leaving the boat in Sicily,

Instituting this monument, symbol of memory would represent a gesture of civility and solidarity for all the local community and the city of Augusta, which to this day is the biggest port of arrival of rescue ships. Moreover, it would represent the recognition due to this city who has given so much in the past three years. (Comune di Augusta, 2018)

The translation of the wreck into an object of art then is not only to commemorate a particular event or a more general phenomenon in the present, rather it is to affirm the moral superiority and the values of humanitarianism which animate the community hosting the wreck (Horsti and Neumann, 2019). As such, the city of Augusta must be not only preferred to the municipality of Milan because it has already been part of the migratory phenomenon, but it also must be granted the wreck as a means of competing with Lampedusa in terms of media visibility and recognition of its humanitarian efforts. In being imbued with cultural importance, the wreck went from being a purposeless husk which had to be immediately destroyed lest it contaminate its surroundings to an object of value, whose purpose was to signal Augusta’s humanitarian goodwill and success.

However, any calculation of its actual value remains contested. On one hand, its symbolic value cannot be readily quantified. On the other, the scramble of Italian administrations to make the wreck their own imbued it with a value which did not reflect the conditions of its exchange. In April 2019, the Italian Navy donated the wreck to the Municipality of Augusta for no charge. The Region’s public prosecution had earlier confirmed its lack of desire to preserve the wreck as part of forensic evidence in its proceedings, further highlighting how the wreck did not truly have any value as a ‘body of proof’ (Comune di Augusta, 2019a). The legal document which formalised Augusta’s ownership also consolidated the wreck’s change of status from a piece of evidence finally into a cultural artefact, as the procedure was carried out in accordance with national law which regulated the donation of goods by the public administration to third parties for display in museums (Comune di Augusta, 2019a). With the signing of the donation contract, the boat was effectively translated from the stewardship of the Navy to that of the Municipality of Augusta as well as from being waste to being part of cultural heritage.

This legal document however, which certified the economic value of the wreck as zero, did not settle its role in public debate on migration, nor its status, nor its value. The debates which ensued in the following months, which are still ongoing, testify to the fragility of those situated processes of translation which transformed a wreck into an object of art. The day after the donation was finalised, the Municipality of Augusta leased the wreck to the Swiss artist Christopher Büchel, granting him permission and the legal right to exhibit the wreck at the Venice Biennale in the same year (Comune di Augusta, 2019b). As the wreck sailed once again on a barge, its voyage and subsequent exhibition re-opened debate about both its value as a piece of art and public discussions on migration more in general.

The catalogue for the Biennale presents the work as ‘Barca Nostra’ and places great emphasis on its political significance and its ability to move public conscience. Both in the catalogue and in the words of the artist, this installation was described as a ‘Trojan horse’ (Biennale di Venezia, 2019; Marsala, 2019; Rugoff, 2019), able to break through political communicative strategies and to cross national borders affirming the human right to free movement. In no uncertain terms, the catalogue calls ‘Barca Nostra’ a ‘collective and commemorative monument’ which is not only dedicated to victims, survivors and humanitarian actors but also represents the ‘collective policies which cause this type of tragedies’ (Rugoff, 2019, p. 223).

Yet, it was not collective border policies which became the subject of debate on the exhibition of the wreck. The wreck was exhibited with no labels, including any tags that could indicate to the observer the name of the exhibition and its author. This choice was justified by stressing the fact that the object could speak by itself, assuming that its communicative power was so stark and univocal as to need no further translation or curation. The artist himself, Christopher Büchel, also declined to offer any interviews or comments to clarify his intentions in presenting such a proposal to the Biennale. These choices engendered various strands of criticism, with commentators from all over the world lamenting the absolute lack of context in which the boat was inserted and the fact that no efforts were made to organise events around it, which would contribute to public discussion about contemporary questions related to migration (Earle, 2019; The Guardian, 2019; Tondo, 2019; Zucconi, 2019). In particular, many of those same commentators highlighted how, by virtue of the very nature of the object, much of the debate has been about its status as a work of art and whether it should be even considered as such in the first place (The Guardian, 2019).

More importantly, the lack of re-elaboration of the piece and its status as a ‘ready made’ has been decried as a signal of a certain complacency with the current framing of the issue of migration without contributing anything new to the conversation. Zucconi (2019), for instance, argues that by making a ‘reliquary’ out of an artefact such as the boat, the moral framing of the ‘crisis’ of migration are reaffirmed without any insight on the political and economic dynamics which ultimately determine these very ‘tragedies’. In this way, the aim of contemporary art to revolutionise frames of reference to understand the present fails as it becomes entrapped into humanitarian tendencies. As such, commentators point out how the boat, can serve as a judgemental pointed finger that elevates the moral standing of those who engage with it by being repulsed by the events which brought it to the Venetian pier, and decries as moral deviants those fail to do so (Earle, 2019). The echoes of moral panic resonate particularly well in both far right criticism of the exhibition, which calls it a ‘moral manipulation’ (Miliani, 2019), and more sympathetic accounts of those who see the placing of the boat in a high-end and commercialised context such as the Biennale as an exploitation of people’s suffering (Tondo, 2019).

In both cases, although the criticism comes from very different political stances, the display of Barca Nostra is read as calling primarily for ethical and moral engagement with the question of violence in the Mediterranean. Just like the recovery of the wreck was framed as a moral and ethical duty towards the recognition of the human dignity of the victims without any political engagement with the determinants of their death, the display of the wreck generated debates about the ethics of humanitarian art and posthumous commemoration rather than border deaths themselves. The curational choice to not provide an overarching narrative for the display did not provide any intervention in a pre-existing public debate, which made migration an issue of saving or not saving boats in distress at sea, leaving aside, once again, the condition which rendered saving necessary in the first place. Both the framings of crisis and of the necessity of emergential humanitarian responses are re-affirmed beyond any space to question them. The debates briefly sketched above indeed revolve around the appropriateness of displaying the boat either because it is unfit for public space or because it should be exhibited in more sombre circumstances. Therefore, while the political determinants of death in the Mediterranean remain firmly outside the scope of public debate, the violence the boat signifies still haunts its afterlife, destabilising its status as an art object which can be comfortably publicly exhibited.

This same debate took place in the council chambers of the Municipality of Augusta. There, the representatives who had initially brought forward the motion to acquire the wreck with the purpose of creating the ‘Garden of Memory’ questioned the decision by the local government to lend it to Christopher Büchel and to have it publicly displayed at the Biennale without consultation. The representative who publicly questioned the Mayor on this initiative cast doubts on the artist’s motivations for initiating such a project, as well as on the source of the financial backing for the exhibition. He questioned the returns that Büchel would receive from such an investment, as ‘such a good (the wreck) must evidently be quite valuable if someone is willing to spend hundreds of thousands of euros to take charge of it for a year’ (Comune di Augusta, 2019c). The Municipality in turn was accused of lacking transparency on what seemed a relatively costly commercial operation.

Furthermore, the form of the display was accused of being a mere ‘commodification’ of an object whose moral and historical value was incalculable. This passage is worth quoting at length:

This Wreck (capital letter in the original) remained outside of the Biennale, without any artistic enhancement, near a café. It has been treated with the utmost indifference because no visits or explanations have been arranged. It is commodification, in my opinion, dear Representatives, of a Wreck that has a very powerful symbolic value, [. . .] and it was instead treated as an object put outside, while people chat, have coffee, take selfies. (Comune di Augusta, 2019c, my translation)

Again, in line with other commentators at the time, the curational choices of Christopher Büchel sparked outrage, with commentators judging the context of the Biennale inappropriate for the type of collective remembrance and reflection called for by the boat. In particular, the symbolic value of the artefact is contrasted with its supposed economic value, which is seemingly understood to be a detriment to the pure and ethical contemplation that the boat is supposed to prompt in its audience. The Mayor’s response to these accusations widens even more the field of possibility in which the value and purpose of the wreck can be framed. Her defence of the Municipality’s work responds to the concerns listed above in two ways. On one hand, she argued that, while the symbolic value of the wreck might be inestimable, its economic value was esteemed at zero when the Ministry of Defence handed it over to the Municipality (Comune di Augusta, 2019a). Similarly, the documents establishing the lending to use in favour of Christopher Büchel reiterated the fact, dispensing any economic responsibility on the part of the Municipality of Augusta (Comune di Augusta, 2019b).

On the other hand, she defended the choices operated by Büchel in the display of the wreck by claiming that those were artistic authorial choices, which she herself had scarcely understood in the beginning. ‘His purpose’ she claims

was making people curious, make it so that passer-by would document themselves, ask questions, [about] what this gutted dinghy was. And it was effective, the first newspaper that became interested, and filmed it, was the New York Times, not a local newspaper, giving great attention to what that was, where it came from, what was its story, exactly due to this choice of the artist. So I think he got exactly the results he wanted and those we wanted as well, to publicise what happened here, in this city, far from the gaze of [our] citizens. (Comune di Augusta, 2019c, n.d., my translation)

The purpose of the exhibition then was firmly understood to be about making Augusta visible as a humanitarian city, rather than making border deaths visible or questioning their determinants.

Indeed, the question of commemorating those who have experienced migration in that debate emerges as something best discussed in terms of personal sensibility, rather than public debate. In the same speech, the Mayor claims,

For me, creating an interactive museum where people go in and see images is very morbid, because, as far as I’m concerned that wreck is a coffin. I went to the NATO base when the operation to recover the bodies was still ongoing . . . forgive me, the smell and stench got stuck in my brain. (Comune di Augusta, 2019c, my translation)

The violence of border deaths, and thus the fact that the boat symbolises them, does not in these terms afford the wreck more value as a memorial or as a historical reminder as initial mobilisation to avoid its destruction seemed to affirm. The haunting presence of violence actually disqualifies the wreck from being an appropriate symbol in public space and empties the process of curation and commemoration of any political value. This I argue is actually a crucial political move, which, as other authors concerned with curation and the remembrance of violence have highlighted (Lisle, 2016; Sylvester, 2018), serves to curtail the narratives re-produced by sites and objects. The wreck once again is both invaluable, as a tool to garner attention to Augusta, and uncomfortable and dirty as a token representing violence in the Mediterranean. Its presence in public space never fully becomes acceptable as it always remains haunted by the violence and horror which produced its gutted exterior.

The haunting of border deaths which made the boat such a valuable symbol made it possible for it to be considered worthy of being converted from waste into art. Its value as a piece on display was centred on its supposed ability to communicate about border deaths and to question the policies which made it so prevalent in the Mediterranean space. However, the channels through which the boat was transformed into art (i.e. the action of the Municipality of Augusta and the curational and artistic work of Christopher Büchel) reframed its value as a shock piece which was aimed at sparking debate and engendering media visibility for the city of Augusta. The debates which ensued then did not question border violence and its causes, but rather questioned the validity of Barca Nostra as a piece of art and the possibility of ethically commemorating border deaths within the spaces of the Venice Biennale. The role of the boat as a coffin, which is what made it a valuable reminder, once again inverts its value by making it inappropriate for view and therefore not a suitable instrument of public memory.

The boat then, after having been elevated to symbol of public cultural relevance, never quite seems to find one univocal role or identity, but it slips back and forth into being evidence, waste or art. All these three understandings of the wreck are results of the complex interactions of the milieus of human and non-human actors with which it became entangled in its short trajectory, whether these were biohazard standard operating procedures, liquid hydrogen, exhibition stages, lease contracts, politicians, forensic professionals, curators, artists and Navy officials. None of these understandings ever quite disappear, rather they are entwined together providing a frame for the complex practices of translation in which the boat is immersed.

Ongoing transitions: the lasting fragility of translations

In April 2021, after 2 years of being stranded in Venice, Barca Nostra was returned to Augusta. In the meantime, it had risked again being towed away to a dump and destroyed. Once the exhibition had ended, the wreck had failed to be removed by Christopher Büchel, and the Biennale was not interested in the upkeep of a piece of no immediate interest or value to them (Di Feo, 2020). Their display set up had to be vacated one way or the other. Rather than being firmly safe in its status of cultural artefact, once the exhibition was over, the boat returned to being an unwanted piece of waste out of place on a touristic pier (Ciccarello, 2021; Marsala, 2019). Contemporary Italian artists mobilised to raise money to return the wreck to Augusta, and only recently in May 2021 the boat returned to the Municipality of Augusta, where the plans to create the Garden of Memory kicked off again.

The status of this wreck then is still an object of debate, and only future engagements with it will be able to tell if its status will be settled by the construction of the Garden of Memory of Augusta and which kind of narratives of migration will be enshrined in that space. This paper stands as a brief and incomplete history of a process still ongoing, which reflects the fragility of the processes of translation examined therein. The aim of this paper was to highlight how migratory debris cannot be understood as alternatively waste or objects of value, but rather need to be considered as the product of complex processes which transform their value without being able to do away with its multiplicity. As such, thinking of these processes in terms of translation, which span the de-evaluation of migratory debris as waste, their disposal, their curation as art objects as well as their analysis and cataloguing as forensic evidence, allows one to hang on to the coexistence of multiple determinations of value.

In turn, highlighting the multiplicity and inconsistencies between different understandings of migratory debris allows us to unpack how they contribute to public debate and why their role in public spaces is always inherently contested. Debris are never fully rehabilitated as objects worthy of display or whose stories are univocal. Rather, they open up questions which can undermine the very narratives they are meant to uphold on the basis of the curational strategies of the actors involved in their re-purposing. In the case of Barca Nostra, discussions on the value of the wreck provided an interesting entry point into the processes which de-politicise border deaths and affirm the current emergential and technocratic understanding of border management. This was the case when Prime Minister Renzi announced its recovery, justifying it in terms of Italy’s values as a civilisation which respects human dignity, denying the role of rescue (or lack thereof) in border deaths and reaffirming the natural danger of the sea. The same discourse, which shifts blame for death from border policies to smugglers, also emptied the wreck of any evidential value once it was received by the Italian prosecution. Finally, the exhibition of the wreck, once it was donated to the Municipality of Augusta, was meant to represent a reward and an instrument for the Municipality itself to gain recognition of its role as a humanitarian port of landing in the Mediterranean. At the same time, the curational choices of the exhibition sparked debate not about border violence itself but rather about the appropriateness of the display and of the boat as an art object.

Regardless, the very conditions of violence, which determine the transformation of a boat into waste on which its subsequent translations rest, also continue to haunt the afterlife of the wreck by unsettling its attributions of value. The wreck indeed is never fully safe from destruction and risks being destroyed every time it seems to have exhausted its purpose, whether that is to hold human bodies or to be exhibited as a temporary installation. Furthermore, the horror of its sinking and its status as ‘coffin’ makes it both hazardous for public health and unacceptable as a public exhibition. While its value contributes to affirming a reading of migration as a humanitarian emergency which never puts into question the political determinants which make journeys across the Mediterranean so dangerous, its haunting presence as a gutted wreck testifies to those very dynamics, destabilising both the meaning and value of the object and the narratives to which they are attached.

This paper contributes to debates in a wide range of scholarship interested in unpacking the materiality of migration and analysing the importance of cultural artefact and everyday objects for international politics. As such, it has shown how materials which make migration (im)possible such as fences, vehicles, environmental barriers and technologies are not the only ones which have a hand in shaping the politics of migration. The debris of migratory passages such as abandoned boats, personal belongings and other materials left behind also contribute to this process by being staged as interventions in public debate on migration. In the scope of this paper, discussion has been limited to one particular case where the limits of a politics of posthumous commemoration and the de-politisation of border deaths emerge, even as the boat’s unsettled status as ‘waste’ threatened to unravel them. Further research might illuminate the different political opportunities created by the translation of those objects in new locations and further multiply the ways in which migration is assembled as an urgent issue of today. Other types of objects and materials, for instance, might lend themselves to different interpretations and give rise to debates where mobile people themselves are directly involved in shifting their frames. This is the case for personal belongings which have been lost in detention and sought again (To Whom It May Concern, 2013) or which are being transformed through the work of migrants and refugees themselves creating new social infrastructures and places to digest past trauma (Mora-Gámez, 2020).