5

MEMORIAL INTERVENTIONS

Lampedusan practices to honor unknown dead migrants have centered on death rituals and praying at the cemetery where several migrant bodies have been buried. Memorializing October 3 at graves has been impossible, however, as the 366 coffins of the victims were transported to Sicily nine days after the disaster. Within a month, the municipality created a Giardino della memoria (Garden of Remembrance). At the garden’s inauguration ceremony, survivors of the disaster who were still staying at the local reception center joined Lampedusans in planting fifty shrubs. Six years later, on October 3, 2019, a monument titled Nuova Speranza (New Hope) was erected in the center of town. The bronze, tornado-shaped memorial bears the names of 366 victims.

In this chapter, I examine how and why Lampedusans created memorials after the dead had been taken away. I also discuss what kinds of identities they produced through the creation of material memorials. In the context of war memorials, Reinhart Koselleck has argued that memorials provide a means to identify the dead as heroes, victims, martyrs, or the defeated (Koselleck 2002, 287). Memorials are invitations to remember an event and the people affected by it in a particular way. They may allow for an erasure of some specifics of the event to smooth the transition of difficult narratives as Marita Sturken (1997, 74, 82) writes in relation to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In addition, memorials are also an invitation to recognize those who have created them.

There are several public memorials in Lampedusa that commemorate lives taken by the sea in general, including the obelisk Cassodoro (1988) by Arnaldo Pomodoro, and two bronze statues by Gerry Scalso, Trionfo del Mare and Omaggio al Pescatore. They are located in the center of town, and although I had passed by them several times, I had not paid them any attention. As Austrian author Robert Musil famously wrote, there is “nothing as invisible as a monument.” “They are no doubt erected to be seen—indeed to attract attention. But at the same time, they are impregnated with something that repels attention, causing the glance to roll right off, like water droplets off an oilcloth, without even pausing for a moment” (Musil 1987, 61). Remembering is not to be taken for granted, and the forgetting of an event might even be the intention of a memorial.

In addition to these lost at sea memorials, there is also a memorial sculpture in Lampedusa that remembers migrant dead: Porta d’Europa. To see it, one must take a twenty-minute walk or a ten-minute drive from the center of town to the shore beyond the airport runway. Porta d’Europa is not a conspicuously inconspicuous monument (Musil 1987, 61); there is nothing on the rocky shore except the monument and the ruins of a small bunker dating from World War II. Porta d’Europa is a sculpture by Mimmo Paladino that was commissioned by Italian cultural actors in 2008 to commemorate migrants who had lost their lives at the sea border (Bolzoni 2008). The open gateway rises sixteen feet tall and faces Tunisia, which is only sixty miles away. The ceramic surface of the sand-colored gate features small sculptures—hats, broken cups, shoes—that call to mind found objects washed up on the sandy beach (for further analysis of Porta d’Europa , see Muneroni 2015; Horsti 2016a). The monument was prompted by the so-called Strage di Portopalo, the Portopalo Massacre, which took place near Portopalo di Capo Passero in Sicily in 1996. At least 283 migrants from Southeast Asia drowned, with only a few survivors. Local fishermen and the local authorities kept quiet about what had happened until 2001, when a fisherman revealed the site of the wreck to Giovanni Maria Bellu, a Rome-based journalist who was investigating rumors of the ship’s sinking (Bellu 2004).

However, these existing memorials to deaths at sea did not serve to properly identify those who were lost on October 3, 2013. The generic memorials were not appropriate. It was not the sea that had taken the victims of the disaster, they had been killed by being allowed to drown. Porta d’Europa was perhaps not considered suitable to memorialize the victims because it had been prompted by another disaster or because it was not created by Lampedusans. In any case, two memorials have been erected in Lampedusa specifically in memory of the October 3, 2013, disaster. They were not prompted by the continuous presence of dead bodies, but by their absence—and by the struggle over the meaning of the disaster that started with the failed “state funeral” in Agrigento (as discussed in chapter 4).

The Giardino della Memoria in Lampedusa

A month after the disaster, on November 4, the Municipality of Lampedusa and Linosa, the region of Sicily, and the environmental association Legambiente inaugurated the Giardino della Memoria with the planting of the first fifty of what would eventually be 366 shrubs on the side of the road that runs through the six-miles-long island.1 While the site is outside of the town, the road is busy during the tourist season: the road leads to the island’s main tourist attraction, La Spiaggia dei Conigli. The inconspicuous memorial garden disappears into the barren landscape, and there is no sign along the road that would encourage tourists to stop. Farther from the road, a modest sign matching the others in the natural reserve where the garden is planted tells visitors in Italian that the shrubs were planted “in memory of the victims of the shipwreck of October 3, 2013—‘Lest we forget.’” There are no names or even mention of where the passengers on the boat were from or the nature of their journey: they are simply “victims of a shipwreck.” There is also no indication that the site of the shipwreck is visible from the Garden of Remembrance. Nevertheless, for those who know, the garden offers a viewpoint for a commemorative gaze toward the precise disaster site in the sea.

The garden was a project that brought together various people and groups on the island, including the anti-capitalist activist collective Askavusa, who created the memorial installation Le radici nel cielo (Roots in the Sky) for the garden. Giusi Nicolini had invited Askavusa to participate in the making of the memorial. The collective had assisted the municipality after the disaster by meeting Eritrean Europeans arriving at the airport and guiding them in the search for their disappeared relatives (interview with Askavusa 2015). The installation consisted of an uprooted tree that resembled the American land artist Robert Smithson’s First Upside Down Tree (1969). Askavusa does not explain the memorial work but when I talked about its meaning with different people, I got the sense that the piece could be read as a form of memorial activism, critiquing the border that turns everything upside down: turns decent to indecent, humane to inhumane. It could also be read as a countermemorial in opposition to the memory politics that was beginning to take form through the actions of the political establishment—or perhaps even in opposition to the memorial garden itself. Instead of symbolically burying the dead, the uprooted tree represented lives in disorder and the continuation of injustice.

Mayor of Lampedusa Giusi Nicolini had refused to participate in the memorial service organized by the state in Agrigento and by doing so, demonstrated solidarity with the survivors who had been prevented from participating. The ceremonial planting of the Giardino brought together those who should have been at the “state funeral” but who had not been invited—the Lampedusan civilian rescuers and the survivors. Together they symbolically reenacted the funeral that never was, documenting the event with pictures in which survivors stand beside Mayor Nicolini, civilian rescuers, and other Lampedusans. For Rosario Crocetta, the president of the Region of Sicily who had also boycotted the memorial service but attended the opening of the Garden of Remembrance, the garden was a substitute for a graveyard: “I go to pray on those graves on the vigilia del trigesimo [marking thirty days after a death] of October 3, the date when the worst tragedy in the story of global immigration happened,” he said at the dedication (Radio Cento Passi Journal 2013).

FIGURE 10. Le radici nel cielo, in Giardino della memoria. Askavusa, 2014. © Karina Horsti, 2014. Photo by Karina Horsti.

The initial planting was not only an intervention into memory politics but also a statement on European asylum policies at the time, Nicolini said: “This is a day on which Lampedusa continues to be an example for Italy and Europe which should adopt new and civil migration policies based on the principle of reception and on the respect for human rights” (Radio Cento Passi Journal 2013). Similarly, Crocetta said: “I am here to honor the dead but also to reiterate that we need to change immigration policies, that Frontex has failed, that the policies of rejection do not work. We need to implement a new strategy that doesn’t deliver more dead and that shares reception policies at the European level and goes beyond the Dublin agreement” (Radio Cento Passi Journal 2013). Both southern Italian leaders are members of the Democratic Party, which has (at least until 2017) been on the liberal side of immigration and integration politics. In 2013, Nicolini and Crocetta distinguished themselves and the Lampedusans from the European governments that, as they argued, were implicated in the deaths.

Both Nicolini and Crocetta thought of the disaster as globally and historically significant—they were “feeling historical,” to use Lauren Berlant’s term (2008b, 5). In her essay “Thinking about Feeling Historical” Berlant analyses the performative act of “thinking” in two texts: the African American gay activist Essex Hemphill’s poetry and George Bush’s speech about the fear of American soldiers dying in Iraq. The performative “thinking” refers to a realization that one is living in a situation that will matter in the future: “A situation is a state of things in which something that will perhaps matter is unfolding amidst the usual activity of life” (Berlant 2008b, 5). In terms of hauntology (discussed in the Introduction and chapter 4), thinking historically is awareness of the specters of the future.

By “feeling historical,” Berlant means seeing and sensing an event as something that one assumes will have an afterlife. “We are directed to see not an event but an emergent historical environment that can now be sensed atmospherically, collectively,” Berlant (2008b, 5) writes.2 The awareness of “the emergent historical environment,” the emergent and unfolding afterlife of the disaster shaped Crocetta’s and Nicolini’s actions. Crocetta defined the event as a globally significant moment in a story that continues to be told, as a tragedy in the “story of global immigration.” Nicolini envisioned the garden as a permanent feature of the island and for the islanders, including future generations. She envisioned a hospitable future, when today’s children would return to the garden as adults and be able to say, “this no longer happens” (Mastrodonato 2013).

Nicolini and Crocetta were motivated first by issues of the present: they wanted to establish Lampedusa as the memory site of the disaster and criticize European border and asylum policies. By October 2013, the island had already become a symbolic site of the European border and migration. Border politics and policies had become spectacularized since the early years of this century, and Lampedusa had turned into a major stage of this performance (Sossi 2006; Campesi 2011; Cuttitta 2014). The symbolic status is also why Pope Francis chose Lampedusa for his first papal trip outside of Rome. His commemoration of migrant deaths during the visit in July 2013 further intensified the symbolic imaginary of Lampedusa. In addition, the locals had memorialized unknown migrant graves at the cemetery (Zagaria 2016), and the municipality under Giusi Nicolini’s term had renewed markings of the graves.

In Nicolini’s and Crocetta’s minds, attempts to move the memorialization of October 3 from Lampedusa to Sicily were wrong. Second, by “feeling historical,” Nicolini and Crocetta were thinking of the present as a future past—they were mindful of the recoverability of the present in the future. They sought to create a testimony for future generations that their communities had resisted the violence of the border and envisioned a future where the Mediterranean Sea would be safe for all. They attempted to make future and take control of the future. This demonstrates how social life has a fluid temporal horizon—both to the past and the future. Barbara Adam (2010) argues that social research often seeks explanations from the past but does not always pay sufficient attention to the futurity of social life—to the fact that individuals and communities alternate between perspectives of anticipated future presents and enacted present futures (Adam 2010, 362).3 If Nicolini’s and Crocetta’s desire to prefigure how their political leadership is judged in the future is informed by the way in which past leaders’ actions and inactions are interpreted in the present time they do not articulate what those events might be.

Crocetta presented the issue beyond the local, regional, and national frameworks by connecting the disaster to the global story of immigration. However, neither he nor Nicolini seemed to consider the potential significance of the memory site itself on a transcultural or transnational scale. Their speeches made no mention of what the garden might mean to survivors or to the families of the victims who might come and visit it. Nicolini had invited the survivors to the planting ceremony as guests of the Lampedusan community but failed to see them as citizens who had an interest in shaping the afterlife of the disaster.

While the garden was clearly created as a memorial of a specific disaster, its meaning could transform. The meaning of a memorial is never fixed on the initial identification inscribed by those who created it (see, e.g., Sturken 1997; Neumann 2000; 2020; Koselleck 2002). People who visit and “use” a memorial can add to or even transform its meaning. In fact, on October 10, 2016, an additional plant, carefully circled with stones, appeared in the garden. A small sign next to it informed that the relatives of victims of an unrelated maritime disaster in Italian waters, the 1991 collision of the ferry Moby Prince with an oil tanker in Livorno Harbor had planted this small bush in the garden. The collision started a fire and released toxic fumes that killed all but one person on board Moby Prince. The rescue effort failed because of inefficiency of the coast guard, and the later inquiries and court proceedings revealed that deaths could have been prevented by an immediate and coordinated rescue operation. Thus, the narrative of the 1991 disaster in many respects resembles the 2013 disaster (Safety4Sea 2019).

According to the small sign in Lampedusa, the plant is “in memory of migrants who have lost their lives.” This (nominally) 367th plant is meant to amplify the garden’s message. First, it is a gesture of solidarity by those affected by the earlier tragedy. Second, it potentially frames the memorial politically as it reminds visitors that there has been no justice for either those who perished on April 10, 1991, or those who died on October 3, 2013. It therefore sheds a critical light on the efficiency and honesty of the institutional rescue efforts—an issue that is still raised by Askavusa, human rights organizations, relatives of the victims, Eritrean survivors, and Lampedusan civil rescuers.4 Third, since the sign does not make a reference to the specific disaster of October 3, 2013, the new plant potentially could shift the meaning of the garden toward a memorial for all migrant deaths. However, if that meaning was emphasized, the Porta d’Europa would have been a more suitable location.

Survivors Return to Giardino della Memoria

The memorial’s sign did not recognize the survivors as creators of the memorial although they participated in the planting of the first shrubs. Neither did the environmental organization Legambiente that was responsible to the Nature Reserve stay in touch with the survivors nor did they develop it in collaboration with them. Nevertheless, over the years, many survivors returned to the Giardino della memoria to care for the plants. On October 3, 2018, I accompanied a group of survivors to the memorial garden.

It was getting dark, but I could still make out the disaster site from where I stood in the Lampedusa Island Nature Reserve. One had to know where to look, however, as there was nothing indicating where the boat had sunk. Mobile phone flashlights illuminated the scene. Six Eritrean survivors and two men who had each lost a brother in the disaster knelt on the ground to clear away weeds and straighten the numbered signs that had been planted beside the shrubs. The dead bodies had been numbered according to the order in which they had been retrieved and the plants in the Garden of Remembrance were also numbered. Both of these numbers had become meaningful for relatives and friends, and some of the men and one woman were wandering around looking for specific numbers in the garden. Some of the numbered signs that the environmental organization Legambiente had added the previous year had gone missing, however, and many of the plants had died anyway.

Among the survivors were two men, Amanuel and Ambasager, both of whom now work in health care in Sweden, looking after mostly elderly people in their homes. They had become close friends during the journey that had ended in disaster. From Lampedusa, they had continued together to Sweden and shared a room in the reception center there while they waited for their asylum applications to be processed. Ambasager’s wife and young son had arrived safely in Sweden two years after the disaster through the family reunification process. Amanuel had also married, and the two men’s families had become friends as well. Ambasager is among the oldest of the survivors. He is a tall, slim man with glasses, about my age—late forties—and has a bit of gray hair at his temples. Amanuel is a bit younger and shyer. When we first met, at an outdoor restaurant in Lampedusa for dinner, he recalled in his soft voice how Vito Fiorino, who had rescued Amanuel in his leisure boat, Gamar, had taken off his shirt and given it to him to wear. Ambasager and Amanuel have been regular participants in the various commemorations that have been held in Lampedusa. They organize and pay for their trips themselves and have been hosted by Fiorino, their rescuer.

On every October 3 since the disaster, survivors who were able to return to Lampedusa had taken pictures of the remaining plants in the memorial garden and of each other standing next to them. Some of them had participated in the garden’s inauguration ceremony in November 2013, when the first fifty shrubs were planted. As then, they again now took group photos and shared them via their social media networks. Survivors who were not present in Lampedusa responded with crying emojis and greetings from their new countries: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany.

For the survivors, being together on the plateau overlooking the darkening Mediterranean Sea brought back memories. As we walked back to where the rental cars were parked, Adhanom, introduced in the beginning of this book, told me in Swedish about an episode he and the others had discussed earlier. There had been a woman with crutches at the smugglers’ collection point in Libya. She was not meant to be on their boat, but she had begged the smugglers to let her board, claiming that her leg needed medical care. The smugglers relented, but when the boat capsized, she had no chance of survival with her broken leg. The survivors had mused: “If she had stayed, if only the smugglers had not let her jump the queue . . . she might still be alive.” These were the types of stories that were shared at the Giardino as the survivors tended to the plants.

Contested Memorialization in Lampedusa

Other than the attention received from the relatives of the Moby Prince victims, the Garden of Remembrance continued to deteriorate. A storm had blown away Askavusa’s installation by the time of my second visit to the garden in 2015. An environmental organization, Legambiente, made plans to rebuild the Garden of Remembrance and in 2018 planted new shrubs and installed numbered plates next to the plants. In 2021, those plants and plates had decayed. The community at large was not involved, and the replanting did not seem to resolve the memorial politics of the disaster. Vito Fiorino, the ice cream maker and captain of the first boat to arrive at the disaster site, continued to envision the return of the bodies to Lampedusa and the creation of a memorial cemetery.

Lampedusans have not been unified in their memorial practices related to migrant deaths, whether before the October 3 disaster or after it. Lampedusans have memorialized unknown migrants on their own or in various groups, motivated by ethics, religion, or politics. Some local groups, namely Askavusa and a solidarity network Forum Lampedusa Solidale have helped relatives organize burials or find graves. The Lampedusa cemetery, located outside of town, behind the airport, is a notable site where material traces reveal the memorializations that have taken place. During my visits to Lampedusa in 2014–2021, I often came across ephemeral traces of memorialization at the cemetery, such as ribbons that had Amnesty International logos printed on them and notes visitors had left by crosses marking unknown migrant graves (see also Zakaria 2016; Squire 2020, 174–76).

Vincenzo, an elderly cemetery caretaker whom my research assistant, Ilaria Tucci, and I often found sitting with other old men on the benches at an intersection on via Roma, told us that he buried the cemetery’s first unknown migrant in 1996. He had since buried more than eighty bodies, praying at the graves and marking some of them with simple wooden crosses. While talking with us, he took a small newspaper clipping from his wallet, unfolded it, and revealed a picture of him greeting Pope Francis. It was from a German newspaper, he said. “There are some who recognize what I have done. They’ve come from Austria, Germany, many countries.” But he had grievances about how some Italians and Lampedusans did not respect his deeds. He was disappointed that the crosses he had made had been removed when a group of religious women from elsewhere in Italy had renovated the section for the unknown dead at the cemetery in 2016. The women had collected donations and paid a local carpenter to make new crosses of wood taken from North African fishing vessels that smugglers had used to transport migrants. One of the women writes in her report of the project, which she sent me by email, that they were inspired by the story of Rizpah, who watches over the dead in the Bible (2 Samuel 21). They renovated the section of the cemetery in observance of the Holy Year of Mercy declared by Pope Francis.

In addition to the renovated section, there are numerous graves intermingled with those of the locals. As Tony Kushner (2016, 90) has observed, Lampedusans have made every effort to provide as much detail as possible about the dead. Most graves are unnamed but gender, possible place of origin and age, and the details of a particular disaster (when known) are included in the printed descriptions on the graves. Kushner defines these acts of remembering the unknown dead not only as personal acts but also as “the first act of historicization of a mass movement that in so many cases leaves not a trace” (Kushner 2016, 90).

On the first anniversary of the disaster, Vito Fiorino had opposed public memorialization. In 2014, he and the others who had been on his boat that night published an open letter to announce that as rescuers, they were refusing to participate in the public commemoration of the disaster: “We would have preferred that the institutions continue their silence, the silence that has prevailed for the twelve months since the tragedy and which is now interrupted by an instrumentalized media spectacle, by useless and expensive political parades. Our commemoration remains private, as it has been since the day of the tragedy” (Fiorino et al. 2014; see also Puglia 2014). The institutional silence Fiorino and his friends draw attention to in their announcement refers to the lack of investigation into the disaster and the failed rescue. Fiorino believed that agencies such as the Coast Guard and the Guardia di Finanza and representatives of the Italian government or European Union had no right to memorialize the disaster in Lampedusa. However, Vito Fiorino continued to memorialize in his own, more private way, first by closing his gelateria on October 3, posting a notice reading “Chiuso per lutto” (Closed for mourning) and spending time with survivors who had returned to commemorate the disaster. He took survivors out to the disaster site on his boat Gamar, a practice he continued even after selling the boat. The purchase agreement he made with the new owner included a provision that Fiorino could use the boat once a year, on October 3. However, in 2017, Fiorino began to take a more public role in memorializing. He gave his first speech at the interfaith commemorative ceremony in Lampedusa on October 3, 2017, standing with a group of survivors at the Sanctuary of the Madonna di Porto Salvo.

Fiorino’s memorial activism was motivated by the lack of investigation into the disaster and the absence of the dead victims—the absence of those whom he and the other Lampedusans had not been able to save. Survivors returned to the island for commemorative rituals every year, and they were part of the islanders’ everyday life through video calls, messages, and photographs sent by Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp. The mediated copresence of the living reminded Lampedusans of the physical absence of the dead. The removal of the dead and their burial in multiple different cemeteries in Sicily was a second disappearance, reminding the rescuers of the first disappearance—the loss of lives.

The civil rescuers were haunted by those who had lost their lives in front of them. During my research in Lampedusa, I often encountered the rescuers’ regret about not being able to save everyone. This regret is central to the memory of the disaster as told by Lampedusans. The memory of saving lives is paired with the memory of lives they were unable to save. “The oily arms that slip away, those Christians disappearing in the waves, looking at me, asking” was a scene that tormented Domenico Colapinto for months after the disaster (Cavallaro 2013): “You hear shouting, you save one, and you can’t see the other anymore. In the moment you decide to save one, you let another one die. To be God, in that moment. My nephew Francesco shouted, ‘Look, there is a woman. Go!’ But as I go, there is another one, arm stretched out to me. Can I let him drown? And so, that woman dies” (Domenico Colapinto quoted in Cavallaro 2013). Constantino Baratta told me he refuses to accept the title of hero that the media continues to foist upon him. We had been sitting in Lampedusa’s Bar dell’Amicizia, talking about the Italian magazine L’Espresso’s selection of him as “Uomo dell’anno,” Man of the Year, for 2013. There was nothing heroic in what he had done—it was only what a normal person would do, he said. “I always say to everyone who calls us ‘heroes’ that I—that we are all ordinary people, simple people. Like last year, I said to [Martin] Schulz and [Federica] Mogherini: ‘No, we are not heroes.’ For one thing, we felt so bad after the disaster because we couldn’t do more. We always regretted having done so little that day.” The memory of being unable to rescue was always part of the memory of rescue.

Nuova Speranza—“Dignity to Our Europe”

In 2018, Vito Fiorino traveled to Stockholm to visit survivors who lived in the area. One issue he wanted to discuss with them was the burials. Two men of Eritrean origin whom Fiorino had rescued met him at the airport. They told me later that day in Stockholm that they both wore identical T-shirts they had printed to honor his arrival. The shirts had a picture of Gamar overfilled with people, the forty-seven rescued and eight rescuers. Below the photo was a text that read “LAMPEDUSA 3/10/2013.”

On the Sunday of Fiorino’s weekend trip, he sat with a group of four survivors, three men and one woman, in the yard of Adal Neguse’s apartment building in a Stockholm suburb. The conversation progressed through multiple layers of simultaneous interpretation. Ilaria Tucci translated to and from Italian for Fiorino, and Adal translated to and from Tigrinya for the three other survivors. English was the language that Tucci and Adal shared and from which I made my notes. As we sat around a garden table, Fiorino explained his plans for the memorial cemetery. If reburial was not possible, he said, at least a memorial should be created. There should be a place where the dead can be mourned in Lampedusa, he said. One of the survivors reminded him that immediately after the disaster, the survivors had protested the transport of the dead to Agrigento and had gone to the mayor of Lampedusa to request that the dead be buried there, in one place. But there was no space in the cemetery for 366 dead, Giusi Nicolini had responded. Another survivor added that moving the dead back to Lampedusa now would probably not be in the interests of family members who were advocating for sending the bodies to Eritrea. Eritrean custom was to bury the dead in the place where they were from when possible. Interestingly, survivors and relatives had not demanded reburials elsewhere in Europe, for example, in Sweden, Germany, or Norway, where many now lived.

Survivors agreed with Fiorino that a memorial was a good idea, and in fact, they had talked about creating one themselves, to be placed in the Garden of Remembrance. The names of the dead would have to be there, one of the survivors said. The memorial would list the names of the dead on a column of white marble, he envisioned when I asked about the memorial again on another occasion. “As survivors, we have a responsibility,” he said. His intention was not so much to evoke the duty to remember in others, such as tourists visiting Lampedusa, or for the memorial to be instrumentalized for any kind of politics. Instead, the memorial was intended for those most affected: “There needs to be a place where the families of the victims can go,” the survivor told me. It would have a therapeutic meaning; the top of the pillar would have a place for a candle. The memorial would stand as a symbolic correction to the burial of the victims in unnamed graves in multiple different cemeteries in Sicily. Because only thirty-one victims have been forensically identified as of 2018 (Olivieri et al. 2018, 125), many relatives are unable to visit the graves of their loved ones, even if they are able to travel to Italy. In this sense, the survivors’ idea of the memorial as a substitute for the graves was similar to Vito Fiorino’s motivation.

To coordinate the survivors, most of whom had settled in Northern Europe, the survivor with the vision for a memorial created a Viber group, which about seventy people immediately joined. After a lengthy discussion, the survivors agreed that the most appropriate site for the memorial would be the Garden of Remembrance. Lampedusa is remote, but as Adhanom had told me when we were at the garden, “It is a place where I can really commemorate my friends and feel connected to them.”

Less than a year after the meeting in Stockholm, the monument Nuova Speranza (New Hope) was unveiled at Piazza Piave in the center of Lampedusa, next to the post office.5 Wooden poles about three meters high rise from the center of a brass whirl, which descends in the shape of a tornado to the blue-painted base. Three hundred sixty-six names of victims have been engraved on the monument in the Latin alphabet. The visual motif of the memorial—a tornado and the sea—reflects the disaster in a figurative, concrete way: the boat overturned, and the people drowned. It could also be interpreted as an explanation of the disaster—that it was a natural disaster, and the killer was the sea. However, this potential interpretation

FIGURE 11. Nuova Speranza monument, the mural, and the poster of victims’ faces at Piazza Piave in Lampedusa, 2021. © Karina Horsti, 2021. Photo by Karina Horsti.

is countered by a sign placed next to the monument, which reads in both Italian and in English:

“NEW HOPE”

3 October 2013

I wanted to give a name to these human beings,

women, men and children,

that after their death have been buried

in various agrigentino cemeteries and identified only with a number.

THE INDIFFERENCE of that night

has made that dawn never came [sic]

for 366 of them.

Vito Fiorino

The sign frames the memorial as a critical commentary about the undignified treatment of the dead, including their nonidentification, and the failed rescue operation. The dead are identified by their names on the memorial, but the sign is written in first person and signed by Vito Fiorino. The name of the memorial, Nuova Speranza, also refers to his boat, Gamar, which had had that name at the time he bought it. In the text, Fiorino is the one who “gives a name” to those who are otherwise known only by a number. The agency of naming was picked up and amplified by Italian author Davide Enia in 2019 in a public social media post:

It was the stubbornness of Vito Fiorino—who so badly wanted this artwork, seeking funding, finding labor, organizing transport—that finally made it possible for the names of the victims of the shipwreck to exist. Before today, they were not remembered anywhere. Not here, not elsewhere. . . . This list of names on the monument gives a shred of dignity to our Europe, so dramatically distant, so indifferent, so cowardly.

What is said about the names both on the sign and in the commentary, however, is not completely correct.6 It was the survivors who had done the initial labor of identification: the listing of the names (see chapter 3). Further, the names had already been used in memorialization by others. The names had been recited in Dagmawi Yimer’s memorial film Asmat and in a memorial service in Lampedusa’s airport hangar and had been shared in the Eritrean diasporic online media and printed on the back of the Sant’Egidio postcard (see chapter 3). The agency of the survivors who compiled the list of names is invisible not only in Nuova Speranza, but also in these other memorials. The names are taken for granted by those who memorialize, and the work and care that went into the creation of the list is not recognized in the memorializations. Some relatives of the victims had even identified and named graves in Sicily, one by one (see chapters 4 and 8). What Fiorino did, however, was publicize the names in a visual form that had not been done before.

The story of creating Nuova Speranza demonstrates how memorials provide a means of identification. Nuova Speranza frames the dead as victims of a double indifference—the indifference that let them be killed by the sea (reflected in the tornado shape and the blue base) and the indifference that failed to attend to their dignified burial. But, as is typical of memorials, the sign next to Nuova Speranza also identifies those who memorialized: Lampedusans, and specifically, Vito Fiorino. They are the agents who are publicly acknowledged as countering the indifference, and in this way, as Davide Enia maintains, they offer a way to feel “a fragment of dignity” and hope for “our Europe.” The memorial offers a space in which Europeans can renounce the indifference that produces mass death at the borders.

While Nuova Speranza was inspired by conversations with survivors, it became a memorial that reflected the needs and messages of its creators. This was obvious in the inauguration ceremony as well, which I viewed via mobile phone videos sent to me by Vito Fiorino and survivors on October 3, 2019. I watched the videos in Hamburg with a victim’s brother, Teddy (a pseudonym). The attendees included Lampedusans and Italian youth who had come to Lampedusa for the Comitato 3 ottobre’s educational program (see chapters 4 and 6). The inaugural program addressed this audience: it was in Italian, and the well-known love song “La cura,” by Franco Battiato, was sung together to create a communal atmosphere for commemoration. In Hamburg, Teddy watched the mediation of a ceremony in which others memorialized the disaster’s victims, including his brother. While his brother was no longer just a number in a sequence of numbers, for the public gathered around the memorial, he was still only a name in the list of other names. Nothing about him was known to those attending the inauguration—except that he was dead.

This, however, is my interpretation of the scene—I had expected to see survivors and family members involved in erecting the memorial and in its inauguration. But Teddy did not share my reservations about the memorial. He had attended the commemoration organized by the Comitato 3 ottobre in Lampedusa the year before and dined at Fiorino’s house. The attention he had received in Lampedusa and the islanders’ memorial practices that he had witnessed then and was now observing through mediation created a social tie between him and the Lampedusans. He respected their acts of memorialization and was comfortable taking part in them. But Teddy is able to memorialize on his own, as well, with his transnational family or together with survivors and other family members of victims, as he had in Lampedusa the previous year. A similar position was common among the survivors I knew and talked with about the memorial in the following years. They respected the erection of the memorial in Lampedusa, which they call in Tigrinya hawelti gdayat Lampedusa, Lampedusa’s memorial monument.

The Communicative Space of Piazza Piave

As soon as the creation of any public memorial is announced, a discursive space opens up. As a multimodal ensemble of visual elements and text placed in relation to a specific material and social setting, a memorial invites engagement from others. Sometimes the space is also open for conflict, and memorials often turn into material manifestations of different types of conflicts (see, e.g., Vinitzky-Seroussi 2002; Neumann 2022).

On the Piazza Piave in Lampedusa, multiple layers of identification were already present at the inauguration of Nuova Speranza. While the memorial project was initiated by Vito Fiorino, other organizations and individuals were also involved in shaping the site. A freshly planted olive tree on the square is accompanied by a sign which reads in English and Italian: “We remember the people who in Lampedusa have not been indifferent and assumed a responsibility in front of those who died in the Mediterranean Sea. Gariwo, the forest of the Righteous.” The sign is attached to a metal frame with two hands reaching out to one another across a piece of wood from a North African fishing boat that was used to cross the Mediterranean Sea. The sign emphasizes the identification of the memorial as a gesture of Lampedusans’ attention and responsibility as they encountered the disaster.

Gariwo—Gardens of the Righteous Worldwide is a nonprofit organization based in Milan that has created gardens honoring “the Righteous” of different causes. The term “Righteous” and the design of the main garden in Milan was inspired by the grove of trees at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel that acknowledges non-Jews who protected Jews during the Holocaust. One of the categories of the righteous in the garden in Milan are those who have assisted undocumented migrants in the present day. The Coast Guard of Lampedusa and the Eritrean Italian human rights advocate Alganesh Fessaha were recognized by the garden in 2015. Constantino Baratta and Vito Fiorino were recognized in 2018, together with Daphne Vloumidi, a hotel owner from Lesbos, Greece, who assisted migrants who had crossed the Aegean Sea from Turkey. As a result of being recognized by the organization, Vito Fiorino knew the president of Gariwo, Gabriele Nissim, and decided to contact him to ask for a donation for the memorial project. Nissim replied that there would be no need to seek further donations for the project, as Gariwo would cover the entire cost of the monument: 15,000 euros (Fiorino 2021). This collaboration provided Gariwo with access to the scene of memorialization, allowing them to plant the tree and erect the sign on the same square as the memorial.

The second memorial element at the Piazza Piave, on the wall of a building next to the monument, is a large mural depicting a wreath of yellow and white flowers resembling the wreath Pope Francis threw into the sea in Lampedusa in July 2013. A number of humanitarian, cultural, and religious organizations that wanted to participate in the memorial7 commissioned the Italian street artist Neve (Danilo Pistone) to paint the mural, which adds a religious meaning to the monument. The wreath, visible above the monument, is an aureole that sacralizes the dead who have been named (but also, potentially, Vito Fiorino and the Lampedusans who are mentioned in the signs).

The third element on the square is made of plastic, and thus, its materiality is not as lasting as the other elements. However, its changeability reflects its function. A poster depicting the faces of 137 victims of the disaster is affixed to the wall below the mural. It can be updated annually if Tadese, a survivor who lives in Rome, receives more photographs from relatives. The poster is a revised version of the Sant’Egidio postcard discussed in chapter 3. In this version, in addition to more faces, an image of the wrecked boat on the seabed has been added.

The poster’s title text reads, in Tigrinya script “Aykrsakumnye nay guezo btsotey, gdayat 3 tikimti 2013 ab Lampedusa” (I will not forget you my travel companion, the victims of 3 October 2013 in Lampedusa), reflecting that this element is created by the survivors, the travel companions. However, this knowledge is available only to speakers of Tigrinya. In Italian, the poster says: “Per non dimenticare 3 ottobre 2013 Lampedusa” (Not to forget October 3, 2013 Lampedusa) and “Volti e nomi delle vittime del naufragio del 3 ottobre 2013 a Lampedusa” (Faces and names of the victims of the 3 October 2013 shipwreck in Lampedusa). On the right margin of the poster is a word in English: “Eritreans.” This adds another identifying element to the memorial: the dead in the photos are from Eritrea. This clue is ambiguous, however. It can be interpreted as an attempt to connect the memorial to a specific nationality (this is a memorial by or for Eritreans), or it can be taken as a critical political message (they died because they had to escape Eritrea). Tadese brought the poster to the memorial inauguration ceremony that was held on October 3, 2019, at 3:30 a.m., the time of the disaster. Since then, it has become a fixed element of the memorial piazza, but its ephemeral material quality suggests it can be revised by adding new faces—and perhaps new meanings.

The way in which a memorial can function as a communicative space and invite further memorialization and additional layers of meaning was confirmed

FIGURE 12. “I will not forget you my travel companion, the victims of 3 October 2013 in Lampedusa” the poster title reads in Tigrinya. Photos of 137 victims, created by Tadese. © Karina Horsti, 2021. Photo by Karina Horsti.

in 2021 at Piazza Piave. The memorial service started at 3:30 a.m., and as I arrived a bit late, the singing of “La cura” was just finishing. The small memorial square was full of mainly high school students with their teachers from different European countries who had been invited to participate in the educational activities organized by the Comitato 3 ottobre (and partly funded by the Italian Ministry of Education). Next to Nuova Speranza, survivors had spread out a knitted blanket that Forum Lampedusa Solidale, a local solidarity group, had made from 368 knitted squares that people from various countries had mailed them. Dozens of red candles were lit by the memorial.

A cameraman and journalist were present from RAI, the Italian public broadcasting company, and when the crowd began to dissolve, the television camera turned toward a group of eight Tunisian women. They were mothers and sisters of men who had disappeared during an undocumented border crossing in the sea from Tunisia to Italy. The women held pictures of the disappeared; one showed a photo on her mobile phone, which glowed in the dark of the early morning hour. They formed a row for the cameraman and others, posing right under the memorial poster with the images of the October 3, 2013, victims.

Holding photos of their disappeared while standing beneath photos of the 137 victims of another disaster, the women created a powerful relation between two groups of “non-citizens” and their mourning relatives. The memorialization of one disaster created a communicative space for the representation and mourning of another disaster. The Tunisian women used the event to make claims for their right to know what happened to the disappeared. This was an act of forensic citizenship—a subjectivity they constituted in relation to the state of Italy, but also in relation to people, particularly in relation to those intimately touched by the October 3, 2013, disaster. They made claims for the rights of the dead and the rights of relatives there in Italy, where their sons and brothers had disappeared. As they performed their act at a site and ritual memorializing another incident, they constituted a relational citizenship with the dead, survivors, and relatives of the victims of the October 3, 2013, disaster. Their act also upheld the visibility of the issue of forensics and identification in the context of the October 3, 2013, disaster, an issue that eight years later was still not resolved. The conjuncture of these two types of disasters, which took place in the same sea, accentuated the broader issue of border deaths and their unfinished aftermaths.

In Lampedusa, memorializing the disaster’s dead, who were not part of the community, reveals something about the community that does the remembering. Three types of identifications and politics intersect in Lampedusans’ physical memorials. First, both memorials, the Garden of Remembrance and Nuova Speranza, serve as an intervention into the memory politics of border deaths—how, where, and for whom is it appropriate to remember these deaths? In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, the southern Italian leaders Giusi Nicolini and Rosario Crocetta worked toward establishing Lampedusa as the disaster’s memory site, and the new administration has intensified those efforts. Nuova Speranza is located in the center of town, and the monument’s visibility is emphasized by the mural, the olive tree, and the poster of victims’ faces. Lampedusans were haunted by the physical absence of the dead, particularly because the specters of the dead lingered in their memories and reappeared with the survivors who visited and remained in their lives through mediated communication. Each survivor brought to their minds a dead victim who could have been rescued.

Second, the community’s memorializing takes a political stance against Europe’s asylum policies and murderous bordering. From the periphery of Europe, which is the center of its border zone, they contest Europe’s politics of bordering, the corporeal and emotional consequences of which they have witnessed with their own eyes. In addition, Vito Fiorino makes a critical statement on the lack of identification of the dead and proper investigation into the disaster. By raising these points, Nuova Speranza amplifies survivors’ concerns (see chapter 7).

Third, the memorials cannot be owned, even by those who created them. Families of the victims of another disaster, the Moby Prince collision, left their mark on the Garden of Remembrance by planting an additional shrub. The garden has also become significant for the Lampedusa disaster survivors who return to care for the plants and envision creating a memorial in the Nature Reserve. On Piazza Piave, Tadese inserted the poster of victims’ faces, accompanied by text in Tigrinya and a label, “Eritreans,” in English. The Tunisian women entered the memorial scene of the October 3, 2013, disaster and inserted their case of disappearance and claims for investigation and the right to forensic identification. In doing so, they constituted a subjectivity of forensic citizenship, both through claims-making toward the state of Italy, and through relationships with the dead, survivors, and relatives of the October 3, 2013, disaster. The layering of meanings on Piazza Piave open up other ways of understanding Nuova Speranza, adding another political scale to the memorial that encourages visitors to ask who the victims were and why they died. Memorials are not fixed. They create a communicative space where the meaning and memory of an event are negotiated and contested.