The 58th Venice Art Biennale showcases “Barca Nostra”, the work of Christoph Büchel, positioned as a residual element of the shipwreck occurred in Lampedusa (2015) resulting in the death of more than 900 people seeking for asylum. The installation triggered a debate on whether a catastrophe can be the object of artistic practices, but also on the implications of the European Union’s border control policies: Where is cruelty exposed? The question of what enables the art of tragedy is followed by the assumption of the nexus of catastrophe in everyday life. It questions the notions of lives squandered and mourned at the crossroads between the ontological and the factual; between political and humanitarian action. What is concluded is that Barca Nostra, rather than being a metaphor, is the normalization of tragedy: an expression of the absence of “never again”. From the deaths in the Mediterranean as a continuum, they emerge exhibiting the consequences of colonialism and the limits of modern thought in terms of imagining a world where all human lives correspond to beings, to being someone and not something.
Keywords:
Contemporary art, Normalization of tragedy, Migratory shipwrecks, Wasted lives, subject
Moraga, A. M. (2020). Making art out of tragedy: Barca Nostra and the intertwining of catastrophe in everyday life: [On shipwrecks in the Mediterranean Sea and migrant lives (1988-2019)]. Revista Bricolaje, (6), 13–25. Retrieved from https://revistasaludpublica.uchile.cl/index.php/RB/article/view/58051
