“IMAGES” in “SURVIVAL AND WITNESS AT EUROPE’S BORDER”
IMAGES
The dominant visual structure in the immediate framing of the disaster in the Italian and international media produced an asymmetrical relationship between spectators and arriving people, whether they arrived alive or dead. News photographs of the disaster employed three types of visual structures that created a hierarchy between the refugees and the European rescuers. First, the photographs depict the survivors and the dead as masses of strangers, which is a typical visual representation of migration globally (see, e.g., Gilligan and Marley 2010; Bleiker et al. 2013; Horsti 2016b). In one photograph that was widely disseminated, at least seventeen survivors are gathered in a small Guardia Costiera search and rescue vessel, half-naked and wrapped in emergency blankets. The figures seem otherworldly—extraterrestrial—in their shiny silver and gold foil blankets. They make up a completely different category of beings compared to the active agents in the scene: the photographers, onlookers, and rescuers on the dock, who are situated in the foreground of the image. The agents in uniform are recognizable figures in any disaster scene. We see them in action and their gaze is meaningful, while the survivors are still, isolated from everyone around them. The European agents represent functionality and rationality in a time of emergency, whereas the half-naked figures wrapped in foil seem strange and dysfunctional.
The composition of the image invites the viewer to look at the scene from the authorities’ perspective, another visual structure commonly used in depictions of migration (see, e.g., Horsti 2016b; Musarò 2017; Giubilaro 2018). In the foreground of the photograph of the otherworldly survivors, a man stands on the dock, his back to the camera. He is looking at the group of survivors in the vessel in front of him, and the text on the back of his vest identifies him as a representative of the Sicilian health authority. He wears latex gloves on his hands, giving the impression that the group wrapped in foil is potentially dangerous. He is there not only to care for those who have been pulled from the sea, but also to protect us, who are taking in the scene from his perspective. The otherworldliness of the survivors is a spectacle, framed simultaneously as both threatening and vulnerable. They are extraterrestrial, not alive in the social sense, which makes them simultaneously a threat and a victim. Their vulnerability does not derive from their interdependence with other human beings but from their “innocence”—they have yet to become part of the social reality that the European spectator acknowledges. They are pure victims, innocents, as the president of the Italian Republic Giorgio Napolitano framed them by calling the disaster “the massacre of innocents,” “Strage di innocenti” (Breda 2013).
In another photograph depicting the rescue, a male survivor on a stretcher is wrapped tightly in golden foil. Two medics on the right side of the photograph are looking at the man on the stretcher, while in the background, two other paramedics are at work. The image resembles the way figures are arranged in religious paintings—suffering Jesus in the middle—and it illustrates a third visual strategy: the European rescuer as moral agent. In this photograph, the medics’ gaze is focused on one single survivor, making him differently visible in comparison to the survivors depicted as a group in the other image. Nevertheless, the active and moral agents in this photograph are again the Italian representatives of some agency, perhaps medical or humanitarian. There are no images in which the survivors exhibit agency or exercise authority, in which they belong to the civic sphere as people capable of ethical or rational action.
Lampedusan civilians also rescued people with their own fishing vessels and would become important agents in the mediated narrative of the disaster. They did not, however, appear together with survivors or the dead in the first images from the scene of the disaster. In photographs and in filmed interviews, the Lampedusan civilian rescuers appeared separately from the Eritrean survivors. On October 4, the day after the disaster, La Repubblica published a series of eight portraits of the civilian first responders, which also appeared as a slide show on their website. The faces of the rescuers are lit by a bright flash, and they gaze directly at the camera. The portraits’ aesthetic centers the emotions and personalities of the named civilian rescuers, while the survivors remain invisible as emotional and personal beings.
This asymmetrical structure, constituted through the three visual strategies, dominated the early media representation. It is typical for the news coverage of migrant disasters and dangerous border crossings in Europe more broadly (see, e.g., Gilligan and Marley 2010; Horsti 2016b; Musarò 2017; Giubilaro 2018). However, the unusual number of retrieved bodies, the proximity to the island, and the local people’s demands to commemorate them resulted in an unusual visuality of migrant death at the border in the following news coverage. The iconic images of the Lampedusa disaster are not among the ones shot on the day, but those taken two and six days later. On October 5 and 9, press photo agencies disseminated a variety of images depicting the more than one hundred wooden coffins that were organized in rows inside the Lampedusa airport hangar.
In this chapter, I examine these iconic images and discuss how they appealed to different agents who engaged with the disaster and its memory. The conscious display of coffins en masse produced different emotions and politics for Lampedusans, the Italian government, European Union leaders, and the Eritrean diaspora. This chapter also discusses how mass death at the border is represented through images in alternative ways. I pay specific attention to visual means of representing the absence of life—rather than the presence of death. What kinds of visual structures can resist and counteract the dominant asymmetrical relationship? How can the dead, survivors, and the relatives of the victims be represented as persons—human beings with agency? I argue for the visual politics of interdependency: seeing the dead in relation to the living brings the humanity of the disaster to the fore.
The Presence of Death in Iconic Images
The Lampedusa disaster was unusual because of its corporeality: hundreds of dead bodies were retrieved from the sea. Neither before nor since has there been another postwar maritime disaster in the European waters involving the immediate recovery and management of so many dead migrant bodies—usually, they disappear into the sea. The proximity of the disaster to the island also meant that many Lampedusans witnessed the management of the dead. Just as the proximity of the drowning necessitated rescue (as discussed in chapter 1), the physical presence of dead bodies necessitated rituals. Stefano Nastasi (2017), the local priest at the time, explained to me how the parish had ordered flowers to be laid on the coffins and how they organized a memorial service at the airport hangar. “The Church had to go to the dead because there were too many of them to bring to the church,” he said (Nastasi 2017). The Lampedusan community expected the dead to be treated in a dignified manner, which included a memorial service where the bodies were present. The bodies were hidden inside coffins but as everyone I interviewed about the service recalls without my asking, the corporeality of a mass death was sensible in the horrific smell that filled the airport hangar on a warm October day.
A photograph distributed by Reuters on October 5 (and a similar one distributed by the European Commission Audiovisual Service on October 9) depict the scene in the airport hangar. In order to get a general view, the Reuters photographer, Antonio Parrinello, climbed up on a ladder to take the picture of the coffins from an elevated perspective. Wooden caskets in varying shades of brown are arranged in three rows, with some space left between them. A single red rose or gerbera has been placed on each coffin. In the background, photographers take pictures of the four small white coffins lined up alongside the adult-sized brown ones. Two of the photographers have kneeled down to focus their lenses on the teddy bears and lilies placed on top of the children’s coffins. Behind the photographers, men and women in uniform stand in two straight lines that are parallel to the rows of coffins. The choreography of the scene creates a commemorative aura and sense of importance in a space that could otherwise be considered unsuitable for memorial services: it is a place to park airplanes. The officers in uniform are turned toward the coffins, and one might think that they are there to pay their respects to the dead. However, at the far right of the image is another row of people whose backs are turned to the coffins—and the photographic moment suggests that the people in uniform are standing in line to honor or welcome someone who is about to enter the stage formed by the space between the groups. The image suggests that while the coffins themselves are a spectacle, another spectacle, for which the coffins will serve as a backdrop, is about to begin.
The arrangement of the coffins in rows represents the presence of death—the presence of many dead in an orderly fashion. The horrific smell of corpses that everyone who was present recalls is not visible. For the European public, the arrangement may be reminiscent of war cemeteries. Such official memorials are built to remind the public of the “duty to remember,” but as Marc Augé (2004) argues, they are not only about memory. Oblivion stands side by side with memory, and one technology of “forgetting by remembering” is the beautification of horror. Describing the cemeteries for World War II victims in Normandy, Augé notes that “the impressive spectacle of the army of the dead immobilized in the white crosses standing at attention” does not evoke memories of horrific battles or the fear felt by the men. Instead, the emotions aroused by the cemeteries are simply “born from the harmony of forms” (Augé 2004, 89).
In present-day mass disasters, the dead are often mourned and buried individually and separately by their families. Visualizations of “the many” are not always welcomed by the institutions that send soldiers to war. During the thirty-year liberation struggle against Ethiopia, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) kept guerilla fighters’ deaths a secret. During, and long after, the border war of 1998–2000, the Eritrean government did not release accurate numbers of deaths nor the identities of the war dead. To this day, the dead of both wars are remembered as a homogeneous group of “martyrs” (Bernal 2014, 122). Victoria Bernal (2014, 122–23) argues that calling the war dead martyrs and the establishment of Martyrs’ Day as a national memorial allows the state to claim all losses for itself while obscuring the private dimensions of loss experienced by Eritreans. The state simultaneously commemorates the dead and hides the actual numbers and identities of those who died; in doing so, it prevents families from mourning an individual lost life.
FIGURE 3. General scene in the airport hangar. © European Union, 2013. EC—Audiovisual Service/P-024114/00-14 (9 October 2013), photographer: Roberto Salomone.
For eighteen years the United States prohibited the publication of photographs of the transfer of soldiers’ remains at the Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. The administrations of both Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush feared that seeing the many casualties, more so than simply hearing their number, might turn the public against the wars in the Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Their claim was that allowing media representatives on site would violate the privacy of the families and degrade what they called “dignified transfers” (Alinder 2012, 197, 180). One argument in favor of the ban was that images of many identical coffins could be instrumentalized and politicized by the antiwar movement. Critics claimed that the ban drew attention away from the human cost of war (e.g., Ralph Begleiter quoted in Alinder 2012, 197). The ban was lifted by the Obama administration in 2009, with the condition that the families of the dead would have to consent to the publication of an image where their relative’s coffin was visible. This requirement had the effect of making it difficult for photographers to capture an image containing many coffins.
Managing the production of visual knowledge of war dead is one form of states’ power to manage not only citizens’ lives but also their deaths. In reference to Achille Mbembe’s (2003, 2019) concept of necropolitics, which formulates how violence constitutes states, cultures, and subjectivities, the management of the visuality of war dead can be conceptualized as a form of visual necropolitics—politics that use visual representation to further states’ power over death.
In the mediated flow of staged images from the Lampedusa airport hangar, there were no concerns about demonstrating the size of the disaster for the global public nor hurting the feelings of the relatives. On the contrary, the indication that performers would enter the stage with the coffins suggested that the arrangement was to be looked at and photographed. The spectacle was realized four days later when a group of high-profile performers entered the scene. More coffins had been added to the arrangement in the hangar on October 9, 2013, and there was no longer any space between the rows. New fresh flowers had been placed on each brown casket, and lilies and teddy bears on the now eight small white caskets in front. Both the European Commission Audiovisual Services and the office of the Italian prime minister released photographs of José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission; Cecilia Malmström, the EU commissioner for home affairs; Enrico Letta, the prime minister of Italy; and Lampedusa’s mayor, Giusi Nicolini, standing together looking at the coffins.1
The display of coffins is the setting of a formal act of commemoration: Nicolini wears a tricolor sash, Barroso is photographed laying flowers on one of the white coffins, Letta puts one knee down on the concrete floor as he stops to look at and touch a child victim’s coffin. The European Commission press office titled its images “Paying tribute to the victims.” The actors in the scene “pay tribute,” but the intentional placement of coffins for appearances sake has an active role to play, too. The coffins are deliberately arranged to have an emotional effect.
The moment in the hangar is referenced in both Barroso’s and Malmström’s speeches at a press conference later the same day. “I will never forget the sight of 280 coffins today,” Malmström (2013) said. Barroso (2013) commented that the “image of hundreds of coffins will never leave my mind. It is something I think one cannot forget. Coffins of babies, coffins with the mother and the child who was born at that very moment. This is something that profoundly shocked and deeply saddened me.” Barroso returns to the image again in a speech in the European Parliament on October 23, 2013: “As you know, I was in Lampedusa two weeks ago at the invitation of the Italian authorities, and of course I was profoundly touched by what I saw. The images will remain impressed on me forever.” Interestingly, it is not clear what “image” remains impressed—the “image” of the arrangement that he saw or the “image” of the arrangement of the coffins that he had surely seen as a press photograph before arriving on Lampedusa, an image that he traveled to witness with his own eyes.
FIGURE 4. European and Italian leaders “pay tribute to the victims.” © European Union, 2013. EC—Audiovisual Service/P-024114/00-01 (9 October 2013), photographer: Roberto Salomone.
In orchestrating the visual event, Lampedusa mayor Giusi Nicolini aimed to make an emotional impact that would sway the government in Rome and the leaders of the European Union. The official visitors to Lampedusa not only viewed the arrangement of the coffins, but became part of it as participants in a commemorative tableau vivant. For Nicolini, this was one of the highlights of her political career, an event she recalled in an interview with La Repubblica after she failed to win a second term in 2017: “Five years ago, in the collective imagination, this island was the gateway to hell, not to Europe. We had to break up the isolation, demand a solid response from the institutions. Barroso came here, too—we made him bow before the coffins” (Nicolini in Lauria 2017). For Nicolini, the arrangement of coffins and the commemorative performance it generated served many functions: they were a continuation of her outspoken solidarity with migrants and their families. The year before, in November 2012, she had sent an open letter to the European Union that was covered widely across the media and among activists. In the letter Nicolini called for attention to border deaths:
I am scandalised by Europe’s silence, which can only be exacerbated by the fact it has just recently been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace yet continues to stay silent over a tragedy that is now reaching figures more commonly associated with war. I am becoming more and more convinced that European policy on immigration sees this toll of human lives as a means to moderate the flow, if not as an actual deterrent. If the journey by boat is the only possibility of hope that these people have, I believe that Europe should be ashamed and disgraced by the deaths, which occur at sea. (Nicolini 2012)
Nicolini’s role in the arrangement of the commemorative spectacle in 2013 continued her earlier political stance on the bordering of Europe. Lampedusans were with her when it came to commemoration, albeit perhaps for a different reason. The display of the coffins was a means to demonstrate solidarity with the survivors, Nastasi (2017) told us in the interview. In addition, shops closed for a day, flags were lowered to half-mast, and a candlelight vigil was held. These actions demonstrated that Lampedusans treat the dead with dignity. And, as contradictory as it may seem, the spectacle of the harmonious arrangement of coffins countered any imagery that may have existed in the public imagination of unorganized masses of dead bodies floating in the sea. In her 2017 interview with La Repubblica, Nicolini said that she had succeeded at countering images of Lampedusa as a “gateway to hell” and as “a holiday destination where one swims with the dead.”
The display of the coffins was also a powerful tool for Italian leaders, who used it to effectively communicate their agenda: to reframe irregular border crossings as a European rather than an Italian problem and to demonstrate the unfairness of the Dublin III Regulation. The arrangement of the coffins also supported Enrico Letta’s announcement that a state funeral would be held for the victims and the “words of apology”—the phrase that he used in the speech for the press the same day he was photographed paying tribute to the victims. As I discuss in chapter 1, Letta avoided making the actual speech act of apology. Nevertheless, his performative pose of bending one knee and pausing to look at and touch the white coffin holding a child’s body can be seen as a visual metaphor for an apology.
The politicians’ “tribute to the victims” (in the words of the European Commission), and Letta’s “words of apology” (as he called them) were insufficient to be considered an apology in a sense of reparative justice (Neumann and Thompson 2015, 15–17). Victims’ families and the survivors were not directly addressed, nor did they receive reparations. Rather than acts of justice, they were performances of benevolence. Issues of justice were entirely absent from the public agenda. And while reparations were not offered to the victims of the disaster, they were, in fact, offered to Italy: in his speech in Lampedusa, Barroso announced 30 million euros in EU support for the country. The announcement was made in both English and Italian at the press conference that followed the politicians’ performance of paying tribute.
For European leaders, the visual arrangement and commemorative acts in Lampedusa offered an opportunity to demonstrate European unity. Migration had long been an issue of division in the European Union. The Dublin regulation was one topic of long controversy—the Mediterranean countries resented that asylum seekers are required to submit their applications in the first country of arrival in the European Union and that other countries in the EU can forcibly deport people back to their first country of arrival. Reemergence of internal borders within the borderless Schengen area of twenty-six European countries was making a comeback in certain regions, such as the border between Italy and France (Horsti 2018; Tazzioli 2020). In addition, nationalist far right parties were gaining support among the European electorate, which alarmed the media. Tougher border and migration control was the main issue on their agenda (Mudde 2016). While these threats of division would be on full display in 2015 during the European refugee reception crisis, they were emerging already in October 2013.
In Lampedusa, Barroso and Malmström presented the European Union as a responsible institution, capable of emotion and possessing agency. They arrived in Lampedusa to symbolically restore order and dignity amid the chaos of mass death. The solutions they offered followed the pattern of the humanitarianized securitization and militarization of the European border (as discussed in the Introduction). In their speeches, they extended their gratitude to countries that accept refugees, to humanitarian NGOs, and to the Lampedusans. They praised the European border agency, Frontex, and the proposed European Border Surveillance System, Eurosur, which the European Parliament would vote to implement the next day.
Both Malmström and Barroso offered their condolences to the families of the victims in the speeches they gave in Lampedusa. While their speeches were otherwise given in English, Malmström and Barroso expressed their condolences in Italian, together with their thanks to the Lampedusan people for their hospitality and to the Italian authorities for their invitation.2 It seemed that the victims belonged to the Italians. There was no mention of Eritrea nor of the fact that many on the boat were on their way to live with relatives who were already settled in various countries in Europe and who were citizens of Sweden, Germany, and Norway. It would have made more sense for Malmström to deliver her condolences in Swedish, which is, after all, her native language. It is also the language of the country to which most people on the boat were heading. But a transnational understanding of the disaster was not conceivable for European and Italian leaders. They treated it as a disaster that had struck Italy and the Italian people—and, by extension, Europe. However, they treated it as a European or Italian disaster only to the extent that Europeans had to witness (mostly through mediation) and manage the mass disaster. They did not recognize and acknowledge how the disaster touched Europeans also at an intimate level: it touched those European Eritreans who lost loved ones.
The politicians’ geographically narrow understanding of the disaster was also evident in that none of the victims’ family members or friends was present, whether in person or symbolically, in the photographic events that were staged at the hangar. The coffins remained anonymous: essentially identical and lacking any relationship to one another or to any living person. There were no personalized elements on the coffins, such as photographs or names. Meanwhile, the survivors, many of whom were related to the dead, were being detained in a reception center for the crime of having entered Italy illegally, a provision that had been introduced by the Italian government’s “security package” of 2008 (Maccanico 2009, 3). They were consciously removed from the scene of commemoration, from Letta’s verbal and gestured “words of apology,” and from Barroso’s and Malmström’s condolences.
A society’s sense of civilization is measured by how it cares for the burial of the poorest (Laqueur 2015, 314–15), and in Lampedusa that sense was being performed at local, national, and European scales. Lampedusans put flowers onto the coffins, the government of Italy provided the caskets and sent the prime minister and the interior minister to pay their respects, and the European Union representatives also arrived to mourn. The body bags had been visible in the media internationally on the day of the disaster, and therefore, mediation of mourning rituals and the dignified arrangement of the coffins were to communicate a sense of civility and sympathy of the agents who were responsible for the aftermath of the disaster either by their presence or by the polity that they represented.
Solidarity and Visibility
The survivors were able to view the coffins on at least two occasions, although those moments were not visible in the mainstream media. The first was a memorial ceremony arranged at the airport hangar with Lampedusans. No photographs depicting the joint memorial service of the two mourning communities were circulated in media spheres. The reason for this is that by October 5, Lampedusans had become tired of the presence of the press. This was typical of the islanders, as clearly expressed in an ironic mural that used to be at the entrance of the military port through which rescued migrants enter the island. The mural read: “Un sorriso per la stampa” (“Smile for the press”). Nastasi (2017) explained to me that he ordered the media out of the hangar before the survivors and locals came in. He wanted to create an intimate memorial service for those who had witnessed the disaster and its aftermath.
What remained circulating in the mediated sphere afterward were images of Lampedusans commemorating the disaster only among themselves. Images of two scenes of commemoration performed by Lampedusans were disseminated through the media; none of these images include survivors. The first were of the Lampedusans’ candlelight procession, and the second were of Salvatore Martello, the chairman of the Lampedusan fishermen’s association (Consorzio dei pescatori) who would in 2017 be elected mayor of Lampedusa, throwing a wreath bearing the words “Pescatori di Lampedusa” into the sea. In interviews, Martello declared that “Fishermen save lives”—an effort to counter the suspicion based on the survivors’ testimonies that a fishing boat passed the migrant boat in distress without making an emergency call.
The decision not to mediate the commemorative event that brought together the islanders and the survivors, albeit important for the people who were present at the service, further removed the survivors from the public scene of mourning. The display of coffins is dignified in itself—a beautiful and harmonious way to honor the dead—but simultaneously, it beautifies horror for the European public, to paraphrase Marc Augé. Coffins as such can potentially serve as representations of individuals, as they are familiar objects that resonate with relationships and familial closeness. But they only accommodate this function if we know who is inside. To the public eye, the caskets remained distanced from the people to whom the dead mattered as individuals. Instead, the coffins represent the presence of death, the biological end of life.
The memorial service at the airport hangar was a memorable experience for three male survivors in their early twenties whom I interviewed in Stockholm in November 2015. During the focus group interview, they recalled how Lampedusans had mourned and cried with them—a topic other survivors too brought up in conversations with me. In Stockholm, we looked at the press photographs of the coffins and watched television footage of a group of about twenty survivors walking toward the hangar. The survivors whom I had come to know were barely identifiable in the footage, as their habitus had changed so much in their two years in Europe. In the footage, they were thin and dressed identically in jumpsuits issued by the reception center. Now, their frames had filled in, and they each had an individual style. The survivors explained that at the time, they had not known what was awaiting them in the hangar. They had only realized what was happening when they saw the rows of coffins. That was the moment when television cameras stayed outside. Many collapsed in shock, the three survivors told me. They cried and consoled one another and embraced the Lampedusans who were at the ceremony.
Since 2014, photographs of the coffins in the hangar in Lampedusa have reappeared each year on the anniversary of the disaster in social media messages and in YouTube memorial videos shared across the global Eritrean diaspora. For those who knew the victims or who survived the disaster, the images convey a different meaning than they do for the general public. For them, the images cannot be seen as a representation of nonpersons: of the many, of the presence of death, of the mere end of biological life. They know a person in one of those coffins, though they cannot be sure which.
I spent October 3, 2016, in London with the sister of a victim of the disaster. Every now and again, she showed me condolences she kept receiving on her phone from people who knew that her brother had died in the disaster. Many of those messages included a news photograph of the display of the coffins. These images also appeared on other sites and in Viber groups she followed, such as a group for those who used to live in the same neighborhood in Asmara, Eritrea’s capital. Often, the photographs had been modified with editing tools: texts such as RIP, Lampedusa 3 October 2013, and May God receive you in heaven, as well as images of burning candles and decorative frames, had been added to the photographs of the coffins.
The continuous use of the images demonstrates that the arrangement of coffins created by Lampedusans has had an afterlife among the Eritrean diaspora. Digital press photographs are easy to circulate and to turn into memory objects that function as signs of solidarity and care. Furthermore, the images of the coffins had a specific aesthetic and cultural plasticity: different meanings could be attached to them. Just as the images served multiple purposes for the Italians, so they did for the Eritrean diaspora. The images have not only been used as digitalized objects of memorialization, but they have also had a political function. The human rights advocates Elsa Chyrum (2016) in London and Meron Estefanos (2016) in Stockholm confirmed in interviews with me that these photographs are the iconic visual representation of the disaster for Eritreans in Eritrea and in the diaspora. Those who oppose the Eritrean government frame the display of coffins as a testimony to the regime’s suppression of human rights, while supporters of the regime claim that it attests to how the West “lures the young” to leave the country.
Depicting Grief
The second opportunity for the survivors to view the coffins was on October 12, when the coffins were loaded onto the Italian navy ships to be taken to Agrigento, Sicily. The European and Italian leaders had left the scene by then, and the journalists, filmmakers, and photographers who documented what happened at the port were for the most part working independently. The scene at the port differs from the earlier, dignified arrangement of the coffins in the hangar. One of the survivors described the scene at the port to me a year later in Stockholm: “The worst thing was that they moved the coffins with a machine, like the dead were commodities. We had heard people saying that in Europe, there is respect for human beings, so we expected respect for the dead. It was awful to see that. We tried to prevent them from moving the dead that way. They said they didn’t have enough staff and space to carry the coffins to the ship. We offered to carry all the coffins, but we were not allowed to.”
This undignified treatment of the dead keeps reappearing in the Eritrean diasporic media as a key topic of discussion and a site of memory. Other Eritrean Europeans have asked survivors why they did not intervene and prevent the undignified treatment of the dead. On October 3, 2020, the Eritrean Swedish activist Semhar Ghebreselassie moderated a four-hour live discussion on the Global Yiakl Facebook site, one of the many sites for young Eritreans of the diasporic resistance. A person who worked as a translator for the Italian government during the disaster recalled the scene at the port in the Global Yiakl program—he recalled how survivors and relatives of the victims from Europe were screaming, throwing themselves on the coffins so that the Italian authorities would not lift the coffins by the crane. “There was no order, it was chaos,” he said.3 An Italian Eritrean activist by the name of Abraham shifts attention from the Italian authorities to the Eritrean authorities of the embassy in Rome: “I’ve never seen Eritrean bodies being moved like this, like they are dirt. It is a disgrace, and it makes me sad. This happened because of the Eritrean authorities [in Italy]. It is their duty, not the duty of Italians. This [undignified treatment of the bodies] is the work of the ambassador sent by the Eritrean government.”
The survivors and ten to twenty family members who were in Lampedusa searching for missing relatives created a scene of mourning on the dock as a crane lifted the coffins onto the ship. In the video footage and in photographs of the scene, the distinction between family members and survivors is obvious from the clothes they wear. The family members are dressed in typical European clothes, while the survivors are still wearing jumpsuits. Together they kneel on the concrete dock to pray and sing. Some had printed photographs of the dead and attached them to the coffins. Others cried loudly and threw themselves on the coffins, and the mourners hugged and consoled one another. The survivors were allowed to carry some of the children’s coffins. The relatives filmed and photographed personalized coffins and vernacular mourning rituals so that other relatives and friends would be able to see how they had memorialized the dead. For the Eritreans, digitally shared photographs of the scene function as visual evidence of death and the ritual closure. I return to the scene at the harbor in chapter 8 where I examine the survivors’ and relatives’ practices of memorialization.
In the European public sphere, the images of the events at the dock were mainly disseminated through independent journalism and documentary films such as Morgan Knibbe’s Those Who Feel the Fire Burning (2014) and in Tim Baster and Isabelle Merminod’s (2013) photo essay in the New Internationalist. Associated Press chose nine photographs of the events taken by the Lampedusan photographer Mauro Buccarello. The photographs disseminated through international press agencies mainly depict Italian officials in protective masks and gloves, coffins hanging in the air from the crane, and the tight arrangement of the coffins on the deck of the ship. Mauro Buccarello, too, was appalled by the use of the crane. In an interview, he told me that by focusing on the machinery, he wanted to communicate how Europe attempted to distance itself from the dead migrants (Buccarello 2015).
One of the images distributed by AP stands out. Rather than depicting the coffins as potentially toxic “commodities” it shows a crying Eritrean European woman, wearing a green velvet sweater, who has thrown herself on a coffin. An enlarged photograph of the victim has been attached to the coffin, and a flower laid beneath it. The woman is being held by three Eritrean European men. The photograph offers an alternative imaginary of the disaster: instead of a massive number of anonymous deaths, it depicts an individual lost life, who is mourned by the woman. Buccarello’s photograph conveys the social relationship that has been severed by death.
Buccarello is a native Lampedusan who has often been the first person on the scenes of migrant disasters, gaining him the attention of the Associated Press. He discussed the photographs of the transfer of the coffins with me one afternoon in October 2015 over a cup of coffee in a café on Via Roma in Lampedusa. He explained that he had felt unsure about sending the photograph of the mourning woman to the Associated Press because he had not had the woman’s consent for publication. In fact, the caption written by the agency incorrectly identifies her as “a survivor.” He ultimately decided to submit the image, however, because none of his other photos captured the grief he had witnessed.4
While the scene at the dock was perceived as unorganized and undignified by Buccarello and Eritreans alike, it nevertheless allowed survivors and family members to take an active role and to perform grief and mourning through spontaneous forms of remembering. These practices—and their documentation and mediation across transnational diasporic families—are crucial in dealing with the social aspects of death in a situation where burial and funeral are not feasible (as is further explored in chapter 8).
FIGURE 5. A relative of a victim grieves in Lampedusa. This photo is of the same series of shots as the one distributed by the Associated Press. © Mauro Buccarello, 2013. Photo by Mauro Buccarello.
Personification of the Victims
In the images of the scene at the dock, photographs of disaster victims taped on the coffins were instrumental in personifying the dead. Another instance of the personification of the victims through a photograph emerged from an encounter between a journalist and Adal Neguse who was in Lampedusa searching for his lost brother. Grazia Longo of La Stampa interviewed Adal (with whom I would later work as part of this project) days after the disaster. In the photo published with Longo’s story, Adal stands on the main street in Lampedusa holding a photo of his younger brother in front of his chest; Adal’s face is pixelated to protect his identity.5 The story explains that he had learned about the disaster on television on the morning of October 3 and then traveled to Lampedusa to search for his brother. By the time of the interview, Adal had received confirmation from the survivors that his brother had been on the boat, but no one had seen him since the disaster.
A quote from Adal was selected as the headline of the article: “I paid for my brother Abraham’s trip: Return his body. Eritrean who moved to Sweden: He wanted to follow me.” With this headline, a complex emotional register is applied to the disaster unlike that of any other news story covering the event: a register of loss, grief, and guilt. The photograph, the title, and the story combine to produce a representation of the absence of a life and of a person, as well as of a relationship between two brothers.
The details provided in the La Stampa story present a more complicated, transnational, and detailed geography of the disaster than what appeared in dominant media representations. The story of Adal and Abraham connected Eritrea and Sweden to the scene of the disaster in Lampedusa. Adal, as an Eritrean Swede, is emotionally involved in the disaster: he mourns his brother and feels guilty for having partly paid for his journey. The brothers’ story reveals the problematics of diasporic relationships. Adal can also evoke memories of the colonial past—a specter from Italy’s Colonia Eritrea claims for rights in Italy and makes the ancient connections visible. The narrative of the two brothers also reveals the Europeanness of the disaster: it connects Sweden to Italy and Europe to Eritrea. The photograph and the story demonstrate that the disaster is European not only at the political level, but also on a very personal, intimate level.
Adal Neguse’s pose in La Stampa, holding the picture of his brother, is a well-known visual arrangement across social movements globally. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, Les Mamans des Disparus Tunisiens in Tunisia, the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons in Kashmir, and the Asociación Comité de Familiares de Migrantes Fallecidos y Desaparecidos de El Salvador are known for carrying photographs of the dead, disappeared, or missing and are often photographed in that pose at protests. Displaying these photographs represents the act of missing or grieving someone; it communicates that the protesters are people who are capable of such feelings and emphasizes the personhood of those who have been lost. The images also appeal: Where is my loved one, and what happened to him or her? They are evidence that the people depicted in them existed, and the public display is evidence that the people mattered. Those who bear photos of the disappeared refuse to forget and to keep the photographs in the private realm. They turn the gaze of the disappeared once more on those who are responsible for the violence.
Photographs of the disappeared can be understood as being part of “the file” that Ather Zia (2019, 157) writes about in her ethnography of mothers and half-widows of the forced disappeared in Kashmir. The women collect information about their loved ones that the Indian forces have made to disappear. The desire to archive and document “traces ‘the absence’” of a person and seeks to make the disappeared persons and their histories physically visible and present. The disappeared are sometimes treated as dead and at other times as if they were alive. Thus, their archival presence is a haunting presence.
Aesthetically, the image of Adal Neguse in La Stampa belongs to the global protest genre and the transnational category of enforced disappearance (Schindel 2020), therefore creating critical potential in the representation of this specific disaster. Adal carried the image with him in Lampedusa because he wanted to show it to survivors and rescuers in case someone recognized the brother. He did not perform a mode of affective politics per se—he was not displaying the photograph as a protest to claim rights for the dead or the families. Nevertheless, as an image, printed in La Stampa, the pose of holding the photograph of a disappeared transforms into a political act. Adal turns the gaze of his brother back onto those who are responsible for his death and for the undignified treatment of his body after death. In the headline, Adal makes a claim: return his body. It is an act of forensic citizenship: Adal generates pressure on Italian and European authorities to carry out their responsibility to identify those who died at the border and to investigate disappearances.
Visualizing the Invisible
It is standard news practice in disaster reporting to publish personal photographs of the victims from before the disaster. In the case of massacres, in particular, the media considers visualizing the attack with photographs of the victims to be an important ethical practice. After the right-wing extremist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019, photographs of the dead were circulated widely so as to demonstrate the loss of socially significant lives. Simultaneously, the perpetrator’s presence in the media was deliberately erased: his Facebook livestream was removed (although unsuccessfully) and the authorities pixelated his face in courtroom footage (Deutsche Welle 2019).
The lack of such representation of the victims of migrant disasters therefore deviates from the news coverage routinely produced in other kinds of mass deaths.6 The Italian mainstream media did, however, use two other strategies to visualize the victims or their absence. While they did not publish photographs of the victims, they provided images to inspire the reader to imagine the victims.
The first instance was in La Repubblica, which reprinted sixty mug shots of the 153 photos that had been taken of survivors at the reception center in Lampedusa.7 The faces have been blurred beyond identification: only the hair, shoulders, and chest of each person are visible. Italian journalists were aware that publishing photographs of the survivors might harm their relatives in Eritrea or risk their opportunity to seek asylum elsewhere in Europe.8 On the left side of each mug shot, a hand holds a number. The sixty black-and-white passport-size photos are printed in a grid on the upper portion of the newspaper page, and below is a headline: “The void, the fear, the exhaustion in the eyes of the 153 invisibles.” The mug shots visualize what is not there—“the void,” as the title suggests. The text explains: “The survivors talk about a cargo of five hundred lives. The photo album ends at 153. The difference is the magnitude of the massacre. Its evidence is in the absence.”
The 153 mug shots visualize what is there, but only the journalist, Gabriele Romagnoli, sees them clearly. He describes for his readers the emotions on the faces of the survivors, focusing on the five women—the women “corresponding to the numbers 42, 107, 108, 132, 149.” In Romagnoli’s poetic reading, the women seem not fully alive; he seems unsure whether life is possible after having witnessed the horror of the disaster:
The first [woman’s face] communicates loss, mouth half open, an empty gaze fixed on something that no longer exists. The eyes have retreated to see the near past, survival is nominal, de facto but not de jure. The second and the third communicate the echo of a challenge that was lost: we will try again. But they have already done it, so it is gone, we will regain that which we lost. The fourth pleads with the only language she has, that of the eyes. She has raised her hands; she has surrendered. She says, repeats: do not let me go. The fifth lies on a stretcher, doesn’t look into the camera lens, doesn’t even look toward it. We could say that she never really reached the shore; we could think she lost something more valuable than that which remained, even though she stayed alive. (Romagnoli 2013)
The day following the disaster, three Italian newspapers, La Stampa, La Repubblica, and Corriere della Sera, published personal photographs that had been discovered among the debris of the disaster and in the wallets and pockets of the dead (for a collection of newspaper pages see Cosentino n.d.). Each picture depicts two or more young people posing in a photographer’s studio. Everyone is holding someone, either by the hand or with arms around someone’s shoulders; two photos depict a man and a woman holding one another, possibly a husband and a wife. The poses and the smiles communicate that the people in the photos care about one another: they are friends, siblings, or a couple. The subjects in the photos have been arranged in front of a studio backdrop: curtains, a copy of a religious painting, a large image of a flowering plant. In one photograph published on La Repubblica’s website, a group of ten young men and one woman is too large for the backdrop and spills over its edges; they fill the whole space of the studio, revealing the backdrop as a backdrop and exposing the studio setting. Fitting everyone into the same frame was prioritized over maintaining the illusion of the studio.
Four years after the disaster, Grazia Longo, a La Stampa journalist, told me that she still remembered the night she obtained the seven photographs La Stampa would publish on the front page above the headline L’ecatombe di Lampedusa, “The massacre of Lampedusa.” It is not exactly clear from our conversation who gave her the photos, and she never attempted to return them to the survivors. The photos were still at her home, she said. Longo recalled that she saw the photos at around 8 p.m. on October 3 and then called the head of La Stampa’s editorial office in Turin. Unlike other Italian and European newspapers, La Stampa decided to use the found photos as their sole front-page visual element depicting the disaster. This deviated from the dominating representation that depicted the disaster as an asymmetrical relation between extraterrestrial strangers and moral Europeans, as I argued in the beginning of this chapter. Longo explained the unique decision: “La Stampa has a style of publishing not only news but also stories. Behind a story there are people’s lives—in this case, lives that cannot be reduced to a number or the category of ‘migrant’ who has arrived in Italy. They were people of flesh and blood.” The importance of the photos, she said, was that they represented the human aspect, “the dignity of the people who died” and “the world where they came from” (Longo 2017).
In their articles about the found photographs, journalists invited the public to imagine the victims’ lives and hopes. They read the subjects’ clothes and expressions as signs that the refugees were not that different from “us” in the West—as signs that the people in the images were capable of aspiring to freedom and Westernness. Goffredo Buccini in Corriere della Sera even used the English words “campus” and “sneakers” to underline the Western aspirations present in his reading of the photographs.
They have American jeans and jackets. Shirts hanging loose, like campus guys. Sneakers to go far in and eyes full of hope. Their dream is in the clothes they wear: the promise of a secured meal that brings well-being, the desire to look like us, to escape from horror and fear onto our shores. In the photos they look into the camera lens, but it goes beyond—their gaze is fixed on the future they pursued here on the other side of the sea. (Buccini 2013)
There are friends, dressed well, and they seem like movie stars. She in white, he in jeans and a soccer player’s shirt, between two yellow curtains and a backdrop of fake plants. (Longo 2013)
The Italian media framed the found photographs as portraits of the dead, although the people in the pictures may not have been on the boat at all. Geoffredo Buccini calls the pictures “photos of the ghosts of Lampedusa” (Buccini 2013). The subtitle of Grazia Longo’s story frames the pictures as foto di vite spezzate, “photos of broken lives” and foto dei fantasmi del mare, “photos of the ghosts of the sea.” In her article, she states: “These little wet photographs, soaked with salt water, are all that remains of those who did not make it.” She interprets the expressions of the people in the photographs as an omen of the disaster: “They don’t smile, as if they could foresee what awaits them” (Longo 2013).
Photographs as Objects
In our interview, Grazia Longo (2017) reflected that she was particularly fascinated by the idea that by publishing the found photographs, the newspaper could illustrate the victims’ “world.” That world was elsewhere and in another temporality. The aesthetics of the soft, faded Eritrean studio photographs contrasted with the sharp quality of the other news photographs, producing a sense of a different time, an unspecified “then.” In none of the newspapers that published found photographs did the journalists reflect on the fact that the people on the boat were coming from Eritrea, a former colony of Italy. The different temporality and space—the “there” and the “then”—remained unspecified, a haunting presence of a silenced past.
In Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, and La Stampa, the photographs are reprinted not just as images, but in their entirety, as objects. The edges of the photos are visible, and in La Repubblica, the little picture lies in the palm of someone’s hand. The public is directed to look at the pictures as printed photographs—objects that could be in an album or a wallet. It is not only the images that communicate the relationality of the victims, but also the objects themselves—that someone carried these photographs along on the journey. The journalists’ language also cues the reader that the photographs should be seen as objects: the photos are described as portafortuna, “lucky charms” (Buccini 2013) and figurini, “collectibles” (Longo 2013).
Studio photographs are taken as mementos: they illuminate the passing of time and an awareness of the has-been or having-been-there nature of photographs. Susan Sontag (1977) even maintains that photographs are always already “memento mori,” reminders of the eventual death. Roland Barthes (1977, 159) has argued in his comparison of photography to painting and moving images that photography has the distinct ability to create an awareness of temporality. However, a studio photograph often represents a timeless past, particularly if there are no clues about when and for what occasion the picture was taken. This quality of studio photographs, along with the fictional placelessness created by the use of backdrops, encourages the use of imagination in interpreting the images. The literary style that the journalists adopted when writing about the found studio photographs illustrates how the found photographs invite or require imagination.
The found studio photographs are not posed family portraits, but instead, document friendships: the subjects are all young and of the same generation. This particular genre of studio photography may remind the European public of school photographs. Marianne Hirsch (1997) points out that family photographs can contain conventional elements that make them meaningful for those not in the picture, as well. In her analysis of mediated witnessing of the Rwandan genocide, Kaarina Nikunen (2019, 115) describes how family photographs seen in an installation at the Kigali Genocide Memorial affect her differently from news images of the dead bodies. She recognizes the format and the function of such photographs: the mundane surroundings of home communicate how the people lived and were loved (Nikunen 2019, 116). Jens Ruchatz (2008, 372) argues that photographs can be “read” by anyone, and in those readings, generic conventions overtake the images’ specific meanings. The aesthetic of studio photography, like the aesthetic of a family album photograph, accentuates the images’ universality and enhances viewers’ ability to identify with the people depicted and imagine their life stories.
Compared to the dominant visuality of migrant disasters that I examined at the beginning of this chapter, the found photographs alter the gazes of the migrant and the viewer. In general, migrant disasters and “Third World problems” such as famine and forced displacement are represented visually either through images of anonymous people suffering en masse—“a sea of humanity” representing “anonymous corporeality,” in the terms of Liisa Malkki (1996)—or through emotional close-ups, usually of women and children who embody a suitable victimhood and compel the spectator to stay with the sufferer (Chouliaraki 2006, 123). In migrant disasters, the gaze of the viewer aligns with that of the photographer, who shoots from the perspective of European rescuers: coast guard, military, or humanitarian agents. It has been rare that the gaze is turned toward the European bordering agents. However, this pattern has been interrupted by NGOs such as the German Sea-Watch that maintain the position of countersurveillance at maritime borders and cultivate “a disobedient gaze”—that unveils “that which it attempts to hide—the political violence it is founded on and the human rights violations that are its structural outcome” (Pezzani and Heller 2013, 294). In addition, mobile phone footage filmed by migrants during the journey, rescue, or push back operations have been mediated in social and mainstream media (Bennett 2018).
In the dominant visualities that produce a hierarchy where the migrants are the objects of both the action and the gaze of the European authority, the migrants are looked at without their knowledge or consent. In contrast, a studio photograph invites a more horizontal gaze from the viewer. The subject poses and looks into the camera self-consciously in a photographic situation that is familiar to the viewer: the subjects have prepared for the camera and negotiated with the photographer about how they wish to be seen. Importantly, they do not pose with a European spectator in mind. In these pictures, the people are not objects of the gaze of the European authorities, but instead agents who ask to be looked at in a specific role: as someone’s friend, brother, sister, or cousin.
Page 5 of Corriere della Sera (Cosentino n.d.) on October 4, 2013, illustrates this contrast between the two types of gazes. At the center of the page is a still from a coast guard video, shot from a helicopter. In the deep blue sea below, a body floats in the crosshairs of the camera’s viewfinder. With this image, the newspaper reader is invited to see the scene of death from the coast guard’s perspective, through their lens. The dead migrant floats in the sea alone, an object without dignity and in relationship to none. Chiara Giubilaro analyses the image as “a violent asymmetry between those with the right to see and represent and those who are excluded from it” (Giubilaro 2018, 107). On three sides of the image of the drowned body are four found photographs depicting a group of friends, a couple, and two individuals. These images are laid out differently—as photographs with their white frames—whereas the image of the dead body is without frames.
The found photographs represent relationality—friendship, kinship, or love—but by re-presenting the photos as objects, the media attempted to transform them from personal photographs or mementos into publicly meaningful objects and images. From among the debris of the disaster site, the photographs were recovered and turned into publicly valuable objects: mediated relics of the disaster. The relics remain—survive—though the people they belonged to have died. The meaning the relics convey to mediated spectators is that those who died were social beings. These photographs did not end up in the numbered plastic bags holding the material remains of each victim for future identification. They also do not end up in the trash. Instead, they were retrieved by the divers and public health authorities who managed the dead and passed the photographs along to journalists, who then created public stories about them. Those managing the disaster identified a broader public and cultural significance of the photographs, beyond their being forensic evidence. The photographs evoke thoughts of the lives that the people on the boat might have lived—a civil imagination (Azoulay 2012) that conceives of the migrants as persons. However, while this presents an opening for an alternative narrative and representation of the dead, neither the media nor the public took that potential any further. There were no follow-up stories or investigations into who the people in the photographs were, no biographies. The objects held the potential to connect people—if they were considered as personal belongings that could be returned to their owners.
The dominant representation of the dead focused on coffins and body bags, the presence of death. The European agents were active in managing the dead—finding and retrieving them, providing coffins and burial places. The hierarchical visual structure, in which Europeans dominated, carried through into images of mourning the disaster. The survivors remained nonpersons, agents without social lives or ethical agency. The arrangement of the coffins, which became the iconic visual representation of the disaster, visualized and aestheticized the “many”—ultimately, the numerical quantity of the dead. The dominant representation produced a visual necropolitics in which Italy managed the deaths of its “non-citizens” as a homogeneous category of innocents with neither individuality nor relationships to Europe (whether past, present, or future). They were not represented as inheritors of Colonia Eritrea, as relatives of present-day Europeans, or as future Europeans.
The iconic arrangement of the coffins had no visual trace of those inside the coffins. The singularity of the dead was erased not only by the representation of a massive number of dead but also by the sanitized similarity of the coffins. Nothing in the images themselves revealed that they represented border deaths or victims who originated from Eritrea. The colonial past of Italian Eritrea was not visible in any way, nor were the victims’ present-day connections with the European countries that were their destinations and where they had relatives. This generic aesthetic and “Italianness” was so profound that later the coffins passed as representative of mass death of Italians. During the COVID-19 spring of 2020, suddenly, these iconic photographs of the October 3, 2013, disaster appeared in social media internationally to visualize the death toll caused by the virus in the Lombardia region in Northern Italy. The images were tagged with #protectourfamilies, #stayhome that framed them as visual proof of the deadliness of the virus. Reuters (2020) and Agence France Press (Mason 2020) corrected the false association in their fact checking sites. In almost seven years, the referential afterlife of the iconic images of the Lampedusa disaster had faded from the public imagination (at least outside of Italy). The images were no longer immediately associated with the original event. Interestingly, the misrepresentation of the images prompted the news agencies to make news about the false context, and in doing so, they recalled the details of the Lampedusa disaster in the context of the pandemic. Global publics were reminded of the border deaths that had taken place almost seven years earlier.
In this chapter, I have identified several critical ways photographs were used to represent not the presence of any death, but rather the absence of an irreplaceable life. Family members and survivors of the Lampedusa disaster were influential in creating a critical alternative representation of the disaster: they chose photographs of the victims and attached them to the coffins at the Lampedusa harbor before the authorities transported the dead to Sicily. Adal Neguse displayed a photograph of his brother in an aesthetic format familiar from its use in global social movements, creating a parallel with forced disappearances and providing a visual opening for the register of forensics and the right to identification. These practices produced an alternative visual politics, that of human interdependency.
The other examples of alternative and potentially critical visuality that I have discussed in this chapter—the blurred mug shots and the found studio photographs—are ethically more complicated than the photographs of the dead that the relatives consciously displayed to the public. No consent was obtained from the people who owned them or were pictured in them. Their presence in the public sphere required journalists to interpret the images for their audiences. They imagined who the victims were and what the survivors thought. Nevertheless, these photographs intervened in and disrupted the dominant visual hierarchy of the disaster. They opened a potentially critical gaze toward the disaster: recognizing absence in the case of the mug shots, and the humanity and personality of the victims in the found photos. The found photographs in particular represented agency, friendship, and solidarity, providing a different and more human register for imagining who the dead were.
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