Documenta11_Press Release 11. Sept 2002

[Claudia Berkermann]

Press Release

Kassel, September 11, 2002

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, dear Colleagues,

Today we would like to inform about the following upcoming event and
welcome you to announce it in your editorial pages.

Multiplicity

Friday, September 13, 2002, 15.00 - 19.00

Seminar 01
Solid Sea
Liquid Europe and Solid Sea: Towards a New Relation

Ort: documenta-Halle, VIP lounge

Multiplicity organizes a round table to consider several case studies on
the problem of illegal immigration in the Mediterranean Basin. Scholars,
journalists, and other experts on the changing sociopolitical situation
in the area will discuss their experiences and opinions with a view to
building a common platform, which should be the starting point from
which to develop joint research on the subject.

Participants:
Giovanni Maria Bellu (Journalist, La Repubblica, Rome)
Anna Detheridge (Journalist, Il sole 24 ore, Connecting Cultures
Association, Milan)
Hariklia Hari (Architect and Urbanist, Athens)
Armin Linke (Photographer, Milan)
Sarat Maharaj (Co-Curator, Documenta11)
multiplicity (Stefano Boeri, Maddalena Bregani, John Palmesino, Paolo
Vari)
Lorenzo Romito (Architect, Group Stalker, Milan)
Yehuda Safran (Adjunct Associate Professor of Architecture, Columbia
University, New York)

For any further concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us again

With best regards

Markus Müller
Director of Communication
Documenta11
Friedrichsplatz 18
D-34117 Kassel
Fon +49.561.70 72 7 50
Fax + 49.561.70 72 7 58
www.documenta.de

LIQUID EUROPE AND SOLID SEA: TOWARDS A NEW RELATION

Ghost Ship

The night of December 26, 1996, a ‘ghost’ ship with 283 Singhalese
clandestine immigrants on board and on route from Malta towards the
Italian coast, sank, a few miles off South-eastern Sicily, carrying with
it its load of life.

For five long years, the relatives’ and survivors’ invocations were
answered by contemptuous denials and ironies from the Italian
Authorities, who repeated with certainty that “the shipwreck had never
occurred”.

Meanwhile, fishermen from Portopalo continuously found corpses in their
nets.

For 60 long months, the Sea slowly returned the traces of a tragedy
consistently denied by the military and removed by the fishermen.

Neither the fishermen, nor the local Authorities had the courage to
denounce the truth, until the recovery of an ID belonging to a young man
from Ceylon suddenly created an breach thanks to the meticulous work of
Giovanni Maria Bellu, a reporter for the Italian newspaper ‘la
Repubblica’.

Today, almost 2000 days after the shipwreck, the ‘ghost ship’, with its
load, re-emerges, visible to everyone.


Solid Sea

The story of the ‘ghost ship’, as many other of the events that unfold
along the entry ‘corridors’ for clandestine immigration in Europe, gives
us an unpredictable and strident image of the Mediterranean Sea;
extremely different from the edulcorated and appeasing one provided by
mass media and sedimented in books.

Today the Mediterranean is no longer -if ever it was- a large and liquid
“lieu de rencontre”. It is no longer the generic space of a network of
relations that unites distant peoples linked by a common geographical
condition; the “cradle” of different yet connected cultures; a mobile
and ‘soft’ area of hybridisation, encounter, blending of traditions,
cultures and costumes.

The Mediterranean is today a hard, solid space, ploughed by precise
routes that move from equally defined points: from Valona to Brindisi,
from Malta to Portopalo, from Algeri to Marseilles, from Suez to
Gibraltar.

While Europe passes through a period of uncertainty, while borders and
equilibriums suffer continuous shifts, while North Africa and the Middle
East are cut by conflicts and differences, the Mediterranean has become
the only Certain Territory of this part of the world. A solid space,
crossed at different depths and with different vectors by clear and
distinct fluxes of people, goods, information and money.


Identities

Today, whoever enters into Mediterranean acquires, even if temporarily,
a stable identity: immigrant, fisherman, military, tourist on a cruise,
oil derrick worker, seaside tourist ... the “costume” will not be
abandoned until the end of the journey across the water. Only afterwards
is it possible to, once again, take up those uncertain, shifting and
multiple identities that today characterise the citizens of the
globalised world.

Not in the Mediterranean: you are either a tourist, or you are an
immigrant; you either transport containers, or use dragnets; routes can
cross, overlap, yet rarely blend. And if and when this does occur, it is
only by accident: a short circuit that puts the different, yet
coexisting, depths of sea into contact one with each other. Unforeseen
events that suddenly unite distinct populations and isolated
“corridors”: bombs dropped by NATO fighter planes and recovered by oil
derrick workers on the floor of the Adriatic Sea; Asiatic mussels
attached to the hulls of container ships; clandestine immigrants’
corpses found in the nets of Sicilian fishermen...

Only then, does the Sea show itself in its three-dimensional power, in
its immense and vague volume. A Sea that is able to cover up tragic
stories for years and yet make them reappear by surrendering a small
clue.

Today the Mediterranean is a Solid Sea where, with incredible growing
density and often at various depths, the planned trajectories of
exacerbated identities graze one another. A part of the world that
appears to be counter-current.


Research network

Solid Sea is an investigation, conceived and coordinated by
Multiplicity, on the nature of the Mediterranean Sea, on the fluxes that
cross it and the identities of the individuals that inhabit it.

The research collects different case studies and analyses them by means
of an index paradigm.

Using distinct techniques of observation (from within the context of
analysis, using a point of view which allows their comparison),
different forms of representation -maps, photographs, videos,
narratives- and multiple research formats (interviews, reportages,
statistics, shadowings) Solid Sea reveals the identities and
trajectories that flow through the Mediterranean.

The new geography of the mediterranean is still largely unexplored.
Solid Sea is an attempt to phatom the new identities that inhabit the
Mediterranean, the trajectories of the fluxes of people, goods and
iformation that cross the Sea. An Eclectic Atlas of the contemporary
Mediterranean composed by the collaboration of a large network of
research institutes, thinkers, and researchers from different
disciplines and backgrounds.


Seminar

The public presentation of the first case study of the Solid Sea
research –the reconstruction of the events of the 1996 shipwreck off the
Sicilian coast- will be a round table where geographers, artists,
architects, curators, historians and critics will debate the recent
cultural, economical, political and social transformations in the
Mediterranean basin. These transformation are reconfiguring the
geography of differences and individualities: a series of case studies
will start to outline a new atlas of the contemporary Mediterranean
condition. The new geopolitical assett  which is emerging in this area
of the world is reconfiguring in a multitude of different modalities the
relations between individuals and institutions, between long term
traditions and intensified fluxes of people, goods and information
across this landscape, posing new questions to the concept of
citizenship.

Multiplicity