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In the winter of 2019, at the very beginning of my PhD, I went to a movie screening of film #387. It tells the story of the aftermath of the shipwreck of April 18th 2015, and the painstaking process through which various organisations were attempting to match the numbered bodies recovered from the water to their families and their identities. I did not know then that this horrifying incident would become one of the core cases of my doctoral thesis. At the time, I was still searching for the questions I wanted to ask and the ways in which I could find answers to them. The screening, serendipitously, helped me put in plain words a niggling feeling I’d been having for a long time while reading academic research on the topic of migration. One of the invited speakers, whose name I have forgotten, said something about this type of incidents being invisible, which in turn made the stories of the people affected by them just as invisible and hard to recover. That struck me. I kept wondering: “Surely, for the people affected, these incidents are anything but invisible? Who gets to decide what is visible and what is not? How can something as massively eye-catching as the drowning of almost a thousand people, which has generated so much attention that we are sitting here in this room watching a movie about it, still be considered obscure?”
Those, in more polished terms, became my research questions. How does migration become tangible as an issue of public debate? How do situated interventions to commemorate migration through monuments and museums, or the practices of forensic investigation of shipwrecks, contribute to shaping what migration is and how it can be made representable? What do they render visible, and what do they hide from view? And how can we account for this process in a way which does not reify again the boundary between what is visible and what is not, without questioning who is looking, from where and through what tools? To address these questions, I investigated monuments such as the Gateway to Europe in Lampedusa, the exhibition of objects left behind by migrants in museums and art exhibits and practices of forensic investigation.
Each of these cases, one of which ended up being related to the shipwreck of April 18th 2015, revealed how there is an inherent multiplicity at play whenever one attempts to “make something visible”. What visible means depends on how the actors themselves in charge of certain interventions understand migration, but also their limitations in terms of resources or available courses of action. Those understandings can then be subverted and reshaped as actors or objects move across space and time. Visibility is always the product of contextual and situated processes of knowledge production, which are never quite settled. The complexity and the fragility of these processes were the main hurdles to studying them, but they were also what I still believe is their most radical potential, as they reveal the politics at play in the contingency of social and political orders. If nothing is ever fully settled, the erasure of certain experiences can be challenged, and resistance can come from learning to look sideways and digging further, which is also what research (hopefully) is for.