| Abstrakt: |
However, perhaps his best-known work, the notorious photograph of the artist recreating the iconic image of three-year old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, whose body was found on the coast near Bodrum in Turkey, demonstrates the ethical limitations of the artist's engagement with and desire to highlight the plight of refugees in the Mediterranean basin. For me it's an analytic, a way to think about how the semiotics of the slave ship - the hold, the weather - continue to position Black people globally in certain kinds of precarity [...] the wake of those ships - and the wake of the ships crossing the Mediterranean today, for people in crisis, blocked from safe port - is a way to think about continued precarity and violence, and where you're positioned in relation to it. i Christina Sharpe, "What Does It Mean to Be Black and Look at This?" The EU response to deaths in the Mediterranean is a semi-militarised one, organised via Frontex, the European Border and Coastguard Agency comprised of national police, border guards and naval forces of different participant nations. National governmental responses in Europe almost universally reflect this view, the reinstatement of border checks that were dispensed with by the EU internally are now visible at its external land borders in the east and on its coastal ones across the Mediterranean. [Extracted from the article] |
