A conversation on the margins of Italy
Nicoletta Grillo
Marco Poloni
Abstract: The Italian margin is largely made up of seacoast. At the furthest south, the border passes through the island of Lampedusa in the Mediterranean Sea, whose space is at the center of Marco Poloni’s work Displacement Island (2006). Starting from this work, the contribution develops a conversation that from the maritime border in the Mediterranean Sea lands on the internal European border between Italy and Switzerland. Engaging with the authors personal and research experience, the conversation touches upon different topics: the contemporary migrations across the maritime space, the Mediterranean Sea as a fluid space crossed by multiple flows, the dynamic link between north and south margins, the potential of photography and its assemblages in constellations as a form to imagine another space, the value of research and production of artworks in the field.
Keywords: Borders; constellation; photography; Mediterranean Sea; Italy; Switzerland
This text is part of a new section of Image [&] Narrative coordinated by Hilde Van Gelder for the editorial team. Experiences /
Expériences provides a platform for researchers, writers, or artists who wish to publish their work in experimental formats. This
section is a haven for — among others — interviews, letters, concrete poetry, or pieces of prose. It also seeks to include integrally visual publications, such as (excerpts from) video or animated works, photo-textual essays, or graphic novels. Finally, we are on the lookout for polemical writings, which open our thoughts to new horizons of dialogue and debate.
Nicoletta Grillo: Lampedusa, a small island off the coast of Sicily, has recently been at the center of political and media visibility. While the political debate on migrations is increasingly polarized, there is a lot of attention to the European marine border in the Mediterranean Sea and the island is considered the first land outpost of the Italian margins. Academic research on this tiny spot in the Mediterranean Sea has also multiplied. The hyper-visibility of the island has been fostered by the numerous shipwrecks and rescues which took place in its sea. In 2011, ten thousand people fleeing Tunisia after the Jasmine Revolution arrived on the island. In 2013, a major shipwreck gave rise to a moment of collective awareness and the birth of the governmental rescue mission Mare Nostrum. Following the dismantling of this mission, in 2015 different NGOs started to operate their own vessels for rescue in the sea. Later the Italian government began to deny access into Italian territorial waters to NGOs vessels and in 2019 the Sea-Watch 3 captained by Carola Rackete had to force its entry into Lampedusa port after seventeen days spent at sea with rescued migrants. Already fifteen years ago you produced the work Displacement Island (2006) dedicated to Lampedusa: where did the need to observe this place arise from at the time?
Marco Poloni: In 2000 I spent two years in residence in Rome as recipient of a Swiss Prix de Rome. The issue of undocumented migrants was already all over in the media, so I quite expectedly became exposed to these issues. One year later I produced a first photographic work in which I followed a fictitious migrant landing in Italy in Puglia after crossing the Channel of Otranto, Shadowing the Invisible Man – Script for a Short Film. The work gained quite some visibility. In the aftermath of this work I developed the idea of making the Mediterranean my work focus, which I much later worked in a statement that describes my agency: “Over the past several years, the analogue island bureau has been building an index of plots, problems and tropes of the Mediterranean Sea. This archive documents, reformulates and expands a number of socio-anthropological narratives and geopolitical scripts of this area, focusing on relationships between social invisibility and power, subjectivity and ideology, individual action and political change”. In Fall 2005, with my work still on display at the 51st Biennial of Venice, I set to work on Displacement Island, which introduced several paradigmatic shifts in my approach to photography.
NG: In the recent article The land seen by the sea you wrote: “If we recognize that landscape is itself a human construction, or, more radically, that in the new paradigm of the anthropocene it coexists with humans in an entangled way, we can start to rethink the relationship between narrative and backdrop”. A cinematic strategy to do that would be “to flatten out the depictive and diegetic levels, thus narrativize the landscape and ‘landscaping’ – so to speak – the human body”. (Poloni, 2019, p. 129). How does this statement relate to the work Displacement Island (2006)? Is there a specific narrative “vision” of the landscape in this constellation as well, which makes it almost a subject more than a backdrop?
MP: When producing Displacement Island I had not yet crystallised this idea of the landscape. It is a work produced within a classic anthropocentric vision of the photographer documenting reality, adding then layers of complexity such as elements of fiction, appropriated imagery and so on. What specifically interested me at the time was the anthropological problem of the participant-observer. I refer to a paradigm coming from anthropology, according to which an external observer coming in contact with a community places himself in a position of an observer, and then of a participant, by staying for a long time with the community, taking part in its habits and getting to know its tools. This is what I attempted to do in Displacement Island. One of the first things I thought is that I was myself a tourist, both when I went to the island on holidays or when I was there as an artist. Hence my anthropological position was therefore dual: that of a tourist trying to articulate the Mediterranean complexity. At that time, I hadn't started thinking about the problems of anthropocene, which is a paradigm that emerged later on. I didn't mean to overturn the landscape and see it as an entity with its own agency so I don't feel my recent statement applies to Displacement Island.
NG: Moving into the images of Displacement Island, in the middle of the book (Poloni, Holert, & Bader, 2013) there is a triptych of three images with the prevalence of different colors - red, white and green -. This seems a clear reference to the Italian flag, but the colors are flipped laterally. After reading different articles on the work, I noticed that this inversion is never mentioned. Yet it came to my eyes, probably because the national flag is a symbol much rooted in my unconscious memory as an Italian. Can you tell me more about these three images?
Marco Poloni, Displacement Island. 2006. # 32, 33, 34. © Marco Poloni and Galerie Campagne Première, Berlin
MP: I think there are a couple of reasons for what you mention. A spectator looking at the work of an artist is in a position of an interpreter. Yet, the artist himself is an interpreter when looking at his work, because the process of creating visual and sound entities is different from the rationalization of that material which we do a posteriori. My interpretation of these materials lies upon two main ideas. First, although not many people saw it, there is indeed the Italian flag. Maybe it is true you need to be Italian to see it. Then there is Godard. The constellation comprises various references to Godard, especially to his use of bright colors in the opening titles of Le Mépris (1963). If you watch the movie, which was filmed in Capri with Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli, there is an opening scene where she asks him if he thinks she has nice shoulders. He says yes. She then asks if she has a nice body. Again, he says yes, probably because he cannot say anything different, or thinks he can't. It's fascinating how Godard lights up the scene with blue, red, and white, recalling the French flag. Hence my 'flag' is also a reference to Godard. Yet, the inversion of colors was not planned but instead came out while assembling the work's visual elements.
NG: In the red image, an archer points an arrow directed towards the inside of the flag. Here I had perceived a metaphorical meaning on the idea of “betraying oneself”.
MP: Of course, it could be. Then it would mean betraying oneself in the sense of betraying the nation and the national ideals, or even the ideals of sacrifice, or those of the sea. According to an old law of the sea, a ship in danger should always be rescued. As of recently in Italy, the far-right has attempted to neutralize this law1
. Yet, this inversion wasn't a conscious choice. The arrangement worked better visually because the arrow also has a direction that goes from left to right, like the reading of time in the Western tradition. That frame is Ulysses in Godard's Le Mépris. The white one is an image of a sonar made on a trawler that shows the seabed. The two visible skulls are shoals, that is, rocks protruding from the seabed against which fishing nets could get stuck. For this reason, they are indicated on the bathymetric maps of fishing vessels. The skull
1 Since 2018 the former Italian Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini, part of the right-wing party Lega Nord, has implemented a policy of push backs for NGOs vessel rescuing migrants at sea. Their boats were denied entry into the Italian territorial waters and the port of Lampedusa, considered by humanitarian organizations the closest safe harbour as an alternative to that of the small nation of Malta. NGOs refused to bring migrants back to Libya. Boats, including that of the Sea-Watch and the Open Arms organizations, remained in the water for days before they could enter Italian waters. The interior minister changed at the end of 2019, yet the role of the Italian government in rescues at sea remained controversial.
has all the symbolic connotations related to the depiction of the dead in the sea. The image on the right is an eel. I took it on the same trawler where I made the sonar image.
NG: At the end of the book, there is a page with three images of a small building's ruins amid Mediterranean nature.
Marco Poloni, Displacement Island, 2006. # 62, 63, 64. © Marco Poloni and Galerie Campagne Première, Berlin
MP: It is an old rudere [ruin] that I found in Lampedusa's inland, although the term is perhaps inappropriate in that context because the island is pretty tiny. There are just two kilometers between the North and South coasts. The island is like a strip of rock on the water. I met that ruin while walking through the inner land, and I thought it could be a temporary refuge for an illegally landed person looking for a place to shelter at night. This does not match the reality because coast guards usually take those who arrive in Lampedusa to an identification center from which they cannot leave. I liked this ruin because it is so elementary that it reminds me of an idea of a primordial hut, like what could be that of Robinson Crusoe, maybe.
NG: Seeing it myself I thought of Laugier's cabane from his Essai sur l'architecture (1753/1972) and the shape of the hut as an archetype of home.
MP: Throughout southern Italy, from Sardinia to Puglia to the Sicilian islands, there are many of these ruins. They vary in shape and type of stone but basically, they are simple constructions with thick walls without windows. I doubted whether or not to integrate these three images into the constellation because they seemed almost too open, too indeterminate, to fit in the narrative. This is not a specific building, and I don't even know to whom it belongs. It is a sort of nondescript architecture. If you think of style as an assemblage of form and function, it is as if this construction had function as its only parameter. There are no formal aesthetic criteria in its design. I believe the same is true for most cubic houses in the Mediterranean area. They are the houses of the poor, of the fishermen, but I like this simplicity, which corresponds to the most
elementary form that one could imagine when you apply straight-line geometry to building a house. This construction is an elemental form of living and refuge.
NG: At the end of the book, the final image shows the sea from a high viewpoint. I wondered if there was an idea of multiple subjectivities here: could this view be the last take of a tourist who returns home or a migrant who leaves the island?
Marco Poloni, Displacement Island, 2006. # 69. © Marco Poloni and Galerie Campagne Première, Berlin
MP: You are referring to the image with a military ship in the sea at sunset. Again, I can say that from an artist's perspective there are no rational answers to everything. This image, taken from a cliff overlooking the sea, is an ending that I have not rationalized. I liked the light, and I thought it might work to close the constellation. Lampedusa is a rock a few tens of meters above the sea and there is this point with a fantastic view over the water expanse. Classically, this viewpoint might be associated with God's gaze, as in cinematic representation when there is a panoramic and high viewpoint the camera is often assimilated to the eye of the creator. But that is not my worldview. What I like is that the sun lights up the sea behind the military ship, but also to the right and beyond. If you look south from Lampedusa, you have Africa. So in a way this is a look to an “invisible continent”, from where the invisibles come from. I mean those refugees everyone talks about but no one ever meets. In the middle, there is the military ship that draws a borderline between Africa and Europe. For me, it is not the gaze of a tourist or a migrant, even though I cannot oppose your interpretation.
NG: The presence of this light made me perceive a note of hope concerning the journey of people on the move in the closure of the constellation.
MP: Obviously, there is a certain amount of positivity. This image works almost in opposition to the gloomy landscape of the first pages of the constellation, and precisely the image on page ten of the book, which still points to the South but shows a very dark sea. The sky is quite overcast, yet relatively clear, while the sea is black, in a certain sense deadly.
NG: In my ongoing doctoral research I consider the theory by Henri Lefebvre on the production of space (1974/1991). I found a closeness between Lampedusa's space as it emerges in your work and his theory on space. Is he an author you are familiar with, who has influenced you in any way?
MP: I have read Lefebvre but he is not one of my reference authors. In this work, a major influence would be Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and their idea of espace strié. I translate their theory into a liquid space, which is that of the Mediterranean. I imagined a liquid sea, crossed by currents of actants, as per the Actor Network Theory of Latour (2005), where the actants are multiple: tourists, migrants, soldiers, flows of goods, but also planes that fly over space - whether to provide GPS coordinates to fishing boats or to report ship movements, even the illegal ones. It is a dynamic vision of space crossed not only by human flows but also by non-human ones.
NG: What interested me in Lefebvre's theory is the idea that representations contribute to producing space. In Displacement Island there are also materials that you did not create yourself, but that come from other sources, i.e. other representations. I wondered what you think about this idea: if representations contribute to producing space, then forms of counter-representation can help produce a kind of counter-space?
MP: It is an interesting question, but it is placed in a different paradigm with respect to that of my work. My starting point in Displacement Island was to try not to represent the migrant because I find it very difficult to illustrate the complexity of the human being and suffering with the medium of photography. I think that the film medium is more adequate for that. I explored a visual strategy using metaphor and metonymy, through shifts that also explain the constellation's title. The displacement is also the Freudian displacement, where you use metonymy to talk about an active entity in yourself that you don't want to see because it is too painful. Hence, you create a meta-image that allows you to articulate what you could not otherwise do. The metonymies I produced are these traces of migrants, like the pack of cigarettes or the life jacket left on the beach. In a way, there is a representation that creates another mental space, but I doubt how this representation can create another solid space. How did you see it?
Marco Poloni, Displacement Island, 2006. # 68. © Marco Poloni and Galerie Campagne Première, Berlin
NG: At the level of material space production, it seems difficult to establish a direct link. However, Lefebvre speaks of the mechanism of imagination as a way for re-appropriating spaces of representation dominated by hegemonic ones. The notion of imagination, which also has an etymological root in the image, seemed to me linked to this idea of metonymies and metaphors. The constellation could trigger other imaginaries through the associations of different images, thus producing another mental and symbolic space, leading to action in the material space. In urban and architectural design, imagining and having a visionary perspective on the future is a powerful tool for change, which later passes into a project. I’m thinking, for example, about the visionary representations of radical architecture of the seventies. Imagination's role in producing a counter-space, as Lefebvre speaks of it, also has to do with the conception of space as an entity that is both material and social. Therefore, the possible change of space concerns not only its material dimension but also its social and immaterial one, in a certain sense imaginative and symbolic.
MP: In this specific work, however, I was not trying to counter a hegemonic representation, such as that of the migrant carrying diseases, as the Italian right puts it today, or as the migrant stealing work, as was said at the time. Displacement Island is not exactly a militant work, in the sense that I was not trying to fight a hegemonized representation, but only to account for the complexity of a space, specifically of this island. However, accounting for this complexity perhaps becomes a sort of reverse shot of the hegemonic representation. In the conscience of the Italian, or more generally of the European, this kind of hegemonic representation is very binary. There is “us” and there is “them”, the Italians and the aliens. These are categorizations that play the politicians' game, and in this sense, they are hegemonic for me. In this case, I tried to debase the binomial representation produced by the media through the representation of a complexity. Perhaps the theoretical connection that I could have made is with Antonio Gramsci's thought (1951) and his deconstruction of the hegemonic vision of southern Italy. In Gramsci's ideas, the hegemonic representation to be countered was that of the meridionale [southerner] as the alien. In my case, on the island of Lampedusa, the alien is not the southerner but the foreigner.
NG: In my doctoral dissertation, provisionally titled In/visible Geographies, I focus extensively on the Italian - Swiss border, which I consider dynamically linked to southern Italy and Lampedusa. Especially to Lampedusa as an iconic point, as many of the migrants I met in the northern city of Como enter Italy from Lampedusa. Later, they reach the Swiss border trying to cross the northern border and the Alps to move further into Europe. Yet, this link between the North and the South is also part of a historical dynamical relation. Many of the frontalieri of the past were internal migrants who moved from southern Italy to the northern border precisely to work in Switzerland. By frontalieri I mean cross-border workers who live in Italy near the national border and work in Switzerland2
. The reference to Gramsci's thought seems particularly relevant in this framework. What do you think of the link between the Southern and the northern border, also in light of your personal experience as an Italian and Swiss artist?
2Cross-border work is the phenomenon of living in one country and working in another, commuting at least once a week between the two. If English expresses the concept via the composition of three words, Italian denotes it with the only word frontalierato, which could be translated as “frontiering”. The word frontaliere identifies the worker. It is a widespread and historically rooted phenomenon in the Italian-Swiss context, primarily due to the economic differential between the two nations that drives many Italians to look for a better paid work in Switzerland. At the same time, many companies have placed themselves in the Swiss border area precisely to employ frontalieri, which generally accept a lower wage compared to the Swiss one. In recent years, this has resulted in wage dumping and a strong conflictuality between frontalieri and local workers has emerged. For a history of cross-border work in Europe see Barcella, P. (2019). I frontalieri in Europa. Un quadro storico. Milano: Biblion Edizioni.
Nicoletta Grillo, In/visible Geographies (ongoing). Inside a parking formerly occupied by migrants Como, 2020. © Nicoletta Grillo
MP: I attempted to give a specific answer to this in a previous work, namely Shadowing the Invisible Man – Script for a Short Film (2001). At the end of the work I provide a visual representation of the crossing of the border on a floating object found by chance, a sailboard encountered on a campsite's beach. In retrospect, I think it was a somewhat simplistic representation because I well knew the migrant routes in southern Italy - which passed through Albania and Puglia - but I didn't know as well the mechanics of passage across the Swiss border. In that work, the migrant hides under the canvas cover of a truck, arrives at the border, and continues on foot across the lake of Locarno. I know that some passages are made like this, but many also occur through the mountain's open paths. However, I am not very well informed about this reality today. Based on your experience, how do migrants arriving from Lampedusa cross the Swiss border?
NG: There was a significant change with the Dublin regulations, which modified how border crossing worked3
. Today, the crossing itself is often relatively easy. There are some points on the border that are entirely open. The reality is very different from the iconic border walls that we often have in mind, which in truth has never managed to prevent the passage of people, although there is a problem with access to information. For a European who knows a little of the territory and maybe even speaks a bit of Italian, it is much easier to find those open areas than for a person on the move that lands here from Africa. In addition to the mountain trails, there are also easy passages in the flatland, both in Como and the smaller villages along the border. Even if a migrant after some time in Italy knows how to cross, at any point where he is stopped in Europe then he can be sent back to Italy if he has already been identified there a first time. The difficulty has become to remain invisible over time, and we are talking about a time horizon that can even be
3 According to the Dublin III EU-regulation of June 26, 2013, migrants irregularly entering Europe cannot choose in which member state to submit an asylum claim but can only present it in the first country of entry and identification. The country of the first arrival is thus responsible for managing the request for political asylum. The regulations have been amended twice, as the Dublin I EU-regulation dates back to 2003 and the Dublin II EU-regulation to 2010. The agreements apply to all member states, plus Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland. Today if a migrant has been listed in one European country through the registration of his fingerprints in the EURODAC database and then transits to another country, the second country's authorities have the right to return him to the first country of landing. This mechanism results in the so-called pushbacks. See https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2013/604/2013-06-29
years. Due to this visibility problem, the crossing is easier for a migrant who does not have black skin because he is less likely to be stopped for checks as he may appear Italian or Swiss, as the volunteers who work for local humanitarian organizations told me4
. Crossing the border is closely linked to the body: the visible and identifiable body, but also the mobile body, which itself becomes the border (Khosravi, 2010). Indeed, there is still this dimension of crossing the border by walking for hours that is one of the possible ways to pass. I've also been told that those who have the money always manage to cross because there are organized routes.
Nicoletta Grillo, In/visible Geographies (ongoing). A path across the Swiss Italian border, 2020. © Nicoletta Grillo
MP: I agree that the problem is to remain invisible over time. I imagine that there are organized routes with which you can cross by paying. There is an old tradition of smuggling on that border that dates back to the cigarette trade but which was also exploited in the seventies by the Italian terrorism of those years. For example, it is said that the Red Brigades had their own paths to take refuge in Switzerland, which they could use if they wanted to escape from Milan5
. Speaking of the Swiss border, a word part of the Swiss vocabulary feels relevant to me: the Réduit national (in Italian, Ridotto nazionale). It is a concept of minimum territory for the survival of a community that does not exactly correspond to the national territory's extension. Instead, it is a strategic portion of territory that incorporates shelters and essential materials for survival such as refuges, agricultural fields to produce food, water sources, military superstructures and tactics. We later
4 Reference is made to informal conversations which occurred during fieldwork activities carried out in July 2020, mainly at the migrant center of the parish of Rebbio and the Osservatorio Giuridico per i Migranti in Como.
5 The Red Brigades (BR, Brigate Rosse) was an Italian far-left terrorist organization that has been active in Italy since the 1970s with the aim of propagating and developing the armed struggle in favour of communism.
find a similar concept in Germany in the so-called Lebensraum. Regarding the border between Switzerland and Italy, I teach in Switzerland and I noticed there aren’t students that documented that border, perhaps also because it is difficult for a country to critically re-evaluate its own history. This is particularly evident when you look for works that address Africa's colonial history, where many European countries appropriated resources. On the other hand, there are books from historians that address those critically important questions.
Nicoletta Grillo, In/visible Geographies (ongoing). An invisible trait of the Swiss Italian border, 2020. © Nicoletta Grillo
NG: The re-examination of colonialism is still something critical in Italy as well. I find it interesting how the concept of Réduit national you mentioned is closely linked to the physical territory, to a well-defined portion of land with specific characteristics, as the very idea of a nation is connected to an earth-bound perspective. The fact that few works on the Italian-Swiss border exist may also depend on a general perception of internal European borders both by ordinary people and academia as softer than the external ones, and therefore less interesting. I believe this is the reason why studies have focused more on the external European borders. However, it is interesting to note that some dynamics replicate from the outer margin internally, such as that of pushbacks. Even the frontalierato could be read as a sort of economic migration, similar to that of many migrants who come from Africa today and whose asylum request is rejected, albeit in a different framework. I’d like to ask you, what do you think is the value of producing artwork or research in the field, going in person to the places considered? You did so both in Displacement Island (2006) and in Shadowing the Invisible Man – Script for a Short Film (2001), where you moved across the entire Italian peninsula.
MP: Every time you perform fieldwork you come to realize how shallow and simplistic the coverage provided by media, any media, of any particular situation can be. The intensity of the encounter with the territory and the trust you build with people through fieldwork can not be replaced by mediated approaches, in particular when trying to engage the immense reservoir of narratives kept by local people.
References
DELEUZE, G., & GUATTARI, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: University Of Minnesota Press.
GODARD, J.-L. (1963). Le Mépris. France: Compagnia Cinematografica Champion, Les Films Concordia, Rome Paris Films.
GRAMSCI, A. (1951). La questione meridionale. Roma: Rinascita.
KHOSRAVI, S. (2010). “Illegal” Traveller. An auto-ethnography of borders. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. LATOUR, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
LAUGIER, M. A. (1972). Essai sur l’architecture. Geneve: Minkoff. (Original work published 1753). LEFEBVRE, H. (1991). The production of space. Oxford: Blackwell. (Original work published 1974).
POLONI, M. (2019). The land seen by the sea. In H. Van Gelder & A. Streitberger (Eds.), Disassembled images.
Allan Sekula and contemporary art (pp. 114-143). Leuven: Leuven University Press.
POLONI, M., HOLERT, T., & BADER, J. (2013). Displacement island. Baden: Kodoji Press.
Nicoletta Grillo studied architecture at Politecnico di Milano and photography at CFP Bauer in Milan. She is currently pursuing a double PhD within the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies at Politecnico di Milano and the Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography, Art, and Visual Culture in the Faculty of Arts at KU Leuven. Her PhD research investigates the potential of photography to reveal the in/visible elements at play in the production of so-called borderscapes, with a focus on the Swiss Italian one.
Email: nicoletta.grillo@polimi.it
The work of Marco Poloni spans cinema, photography, text and installation. Over the past several years, Poloni has been building an index of plots, problems and tropes of the Mediterranean. This archive documents, reformulates and expands a number of geopolitical scripts and anthropological narratives of this area, focusing on relationships between social invisibility and power, subjectivity and ideology, individual action and political change.
