Women-photographs among the phantoms of the Mediterranean

This text—which opens with a forward written in the aftermath of the 2015 attacks in Paris and some critical thoughts on the march and discursive productions that followed—presents some remarks on the numerous “shipwrecks with spectators” that constitute one of the fundamental visual experiences of the present on the Northern shore of the Mediterranean. (These remarks were prepared for a May 2014 seminar). In particular, the analysis focuses on the production of institutional images that followed the shipwrecks of October 3 and 11, 2013, and points to the “displayability” of “migrant bodies” e to the consequent participation of spectators’ gaze in the construction of such displayability. It is thus a participation in the gaze that power produces, in the gaze on subjects—women, men, children—produced by migration government policies in their preventing these subjects’ possibility to move and consigning them to the gaze of spectators “only as shipwrecked people.” In this context, the capacity for critical thought and collective action on these subjects on the part of groups that oppose such migration politics is lacking. Some hints in the direction of articulating a possible approach to this situation come from the movement of the mothers and families of disappeared Tunisian migrants. The movement originated in Tunisia in the aftermath of the revolution and, even years later, it keeps asking “to account” for migrants’ disappearance.