The Mediterranean as sepulcrum nostrum: drowned refugees, commemorative artworks and maritime heritage of the future

ABSTRACT

Long considered a cultural contact zone, the Mediterranean has become a weaponised border zone keeping refugees from Africa and the Middle East away from ‘Fortress Europe’. The Mediterranean has become excessively dangerous to cross, leading many commentators to call this maritime space a ‘massive graveyard’. The widespread indifference and enmity towards migrants in Europe is, amongst other things, countered by documentary and commemorative projects by artists drawing attention to the suffering of drowned refugees. In this paper, I zoom in on documentary and memorial artistic projects by Mimmo Paladino, Jason deCaires Taylor, Christoph Büchel, Ai Weiwei and Đỉnh Q. Lê. In the frequent absence of dead bodies and specific grave sites on the ‘high seas’, they make claims regarding the humanity, singularity and memorability of the human lives of refugees drowned at sea. Based on a description of the artworks and their public, I make two interlinked theoretical arguments. First, the commemorative materialisations by contemporary artists are temporal claims to constitute the cultural heritage of the future. Second, given the sea’s aquatic materiality, the commemorative claims of these art projects require that commemorative materialisations must spatially move from the flux of the sea to the fixity of the land.

KEYWORDS:

• Drowned refugees
• commemorative artworks
• maritime heritage of the future
• Mediterranean

Introduction

In the wake of the failed Arab Spring and the emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Europe witnessed in 2015 a so-called refugee crisis, whereby the idea of ‘crisis’ referred to the problems that large numbers of refugees were assumed to inflict on European societies. With the words Wir schaffen das [We manage that], the former German chancellor Angela Merkel sought to downplay the crisis aspect of the stream of refugees – to use an aquatic metaphor.¹ Soon afterwards, however, the refugee crisis became an EU crisis as most member states sought to close their borders for refugees, who were often rebaptised asylum seekers or illegal migrants, while a resurgent white supremacist movement peddled in great replacement theories. The closure of terrestrial borders with patrols and fences in 2015 shifted the refugee streams to the Mediterranean, which had become the de facto border between the EU and the Middle East and North Africa (a.k.a MENA), and West Asia. Two dramatic events in 2015 highlighted the dangers of crossing the Mediterranean and elicited widespread sympathy in Europe for the plight of refugees. One was the sinking of a fishing boat after a collision with a Portuguese container ship on 19 April 2015, with over 800 refugees on board of whom only 28 were rescued.² The other was the drowning of the Syrian toddler Aylan (westernised as Alan) Kurdi, whose image face down on a Turkish beach circulated around the world.³

But this European sympathy for refugees was short-lived, and subsequent EU policies aimed to close the maritime route for refugees via the Mediterranean as well. These policies are coordinated by the EU border protection agency Frontex and executed by the coast guards and border police of the various EU member states, making the crossing ever more dangerous for refugees and resulting in rising numbers of drowned victims. Whereas governments and media continue to speak about the phenomenon of migration itself in terms of crisis, every now and then a dramatic event occurs that shakes up the political consensus. For instance, the wrecking of a boat with around 200 refugees off the coast of Calabria and depositing over 80 dead bodies on the beach in February 2023 stirred the Italian coast guard into action. It even used helicopters to look for bodies floating in the sea, whereas that same coast guard seeks to prevent ships run by humanitarian NGOs from picking up refugees from sinking boats.⁴

The widespread indifference, apathy and enmity towards migrants in Europe are countered by rescue and documentary efforts by humanitarian activists and by artists with commemorative projects going beyond the pictorial ubiquity of human suffering. Countering border policies and political and media representations depicting refugees as a scourge, many contemporary artists have sought to highlight the suffering of refugees in a variety of different ways, by depicting the arduous travel, by collecting, reassembling and displaying objects left behind by refugees as art installations or by re-enacting drowning and death in performance art – to name just a few modalities (see Tello 2016). Two art projects making global headlines were the art performance by global superstar artist Ai Weiwei when he mimicked the pose of Aylan Kurdi’s body on the beach where he washed up.⁵ The other was the 2019 Venice Biennale installation by the Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph Büchel of the wreck of the fishing boat that had gone down in 2015 with 800 refugees and had subsequently been lifted by the Italian navy to bury the dead and then released.⁶ These are just two well-known examples, but what many of the art projects have in common is first of all the attempt to draw public attention to the humanity of the refugees – both living and dead – and second the memorialisation and eventually commemoration of those who have died and often disappeared at sea.

Empirically, in this article, I seek to focus on these artistic endeavours as commemorative projects, oftentimes by artists who are themselves migrants, refugees, or their descendants. Theoretically, I must unpack the intertwined temporalities of two categories that are often considered as mutually opposed, namely contemporary art and cultural heritage. Elsewhere, I have described (rather than defined) heritage as ‘the materialization’ and showed how the cultural (or other) ‘heritage’ predicate often serves as a vehicle for appropriation by experts, state agencies, market forces, etc. (Salemink 2021). At the very least, these outside agents interfere with how heritage constituencies own, manage, remember, memorialise, commemorate, enact and deal with whatever heritage we speak of, such as sites, objects, cultural memories and practices. Thus, heritage is not a ‘thing’ that can be ascertained and recognised as ‘real’ or ‘not real’; instead, I see heritage as a process of memorialisation, commemoration, valuation, validation, and sacralisation of sites, objects and intangible practices, frequently through increasingly formalised recognition procedures. Here, however, I make a clear distinction between, on the one hand, the memories and memorialisations of drowned refugees constructed by loved ones and fellow migrants left behind, and, on the other, the efforts of artists and art worlds to commemorate.

More specifically, I argue that present-day art – and especially commemorative art – is intended to be the anticipatory heritage of the future (cf. Stengs 2018; see also Harrison et al. 2020; Harvey 2001; Holtorf and Högberg 2021). In addition, in this IJHS theme section on ‘Oceanic geographies and maritime heritage in the making’, I must come to grips with the spatiality of such commemorative art projects that explicitly refer to events in marine spaces but that given the forbidding materiality of the sea are usually enacted on land. Much like maritime museums as containers of maritime heritage are usually located in cities and other terrestrial terrains, I argue that art that explicitly commemorates the maritime tragedies befalling thousands of refugees crossing the Mediterranean be considered maritime heritage of the future because the artistic commentary refers to the Mediterranean, regardless of the marine or terrestrial location of the artwork.⁷

I develop these theoretical arguments in several steps, beginning with a section that engages with the notion of ‘Oceanic geographies’ in the title of the theme issue as well as with the subtitle ‘Producing history, memory and territory’ by charting the transformation of the Mediterranean from a historical and cultural zone of connection to a modern-day border area separating Europe – or more precisely the EU – from North Africa and West Asia. In a subsequent section, I will briefly elaborate on the temporal and spatial assumptions regarding the connections between art and heritage that underpin my twin theoretical arguments and that engage with the phrase ‘maritime heritage in the making’ in the title of this theme issue. Further sections describe and analyse the various modalities of ‘artistic commemorations’ of – usually drowned – refugees over the last decade; highlight a few artists who themselves identify as ‘refugee artists’ and reflect on ‘artistic materializations’ against the backdrop of the marine and maritime materialities afforded by the sea (cf. Roszko 2021).

The empirical material that I draw on was gathered between 2016 and 2019 via the project ‘Global Europe: Constituting Europe from Outside in Through Artefact’ for which I was a Principal Investigator and conducted field research in museums and art spaces in Brazil, China, India, Japan and South Africa (e.g. Salemink 2023). While the Global Europe project aimed to explore how the collection, circulation, classification, and museum exhibition of objects define Europe from the outside in relation to the region’s diminishing influence on global affairs (Salemink 2023), it also allowed me to familiarise myself with those documentary and artistic projects that have set out to counter the anonymity and historical erasure of refugees in the aquatic flux of the sea. Using anthropological, historical and museological methods, I conducted field research in various museums and venues located in and beyond Europe that have hosted global art fairs and exposés.

Mare nostrum – sepulcrum nostrum

Many human rights activists and critical scholars call the Mediterranean a massive ‘graveyard’ of migrants and refugees, many of whom are Muslims from Central and West Asia and from North Africa (Cabot 2019; González Ortega and García 2022; Heller and Pezzani 2017; Koenig 2018; M’charek 2018, 2020).⁸ Before the Mediterranean became a weaponised border zone, it was a contact zone connecting the various coastal populations, polities, and their hinterlands. The ancient Romans called the Mediterranean Mare Nostrum, meaning ‘Our Sea’. The possessive nostrum referred to the fact that the sea was the aquatic centre that held Rome’s terrestrial empire together, as well as to the fact that it afforded easy maritime transportation – leaving much maritime heritage behind. Through the eras of the Byzantine Empire, the Muslim conquests, the Crusades and Ottoman domination via Braudel’s age of Philip II to the age of European colonialism (Braudel 1972; De Genova 2017a, 2017b; Horden and Purcell 2000, 2006), the Mediterranean continued to be a geo-historical zone of connection rather than division. Still, after World War II British and American anthropologists considered the Mediterranean as one ‘culture area’ characterised by a common ‘honor and shame’ culture (Campbell 1964; Pitt-Rivers 1963). Only from the 1980s onwards was this essentializing culturalism effectively debunked (Coombe 1990; Herzfeld 1980; Pina-Cabral 1989).

More recently, the idea of a ‘Mediterranean region’ was scrutinised in critical conjunction with other purported cultural regions, like Europe (the EU in particular), the Middle East and Africa (Ben-Yehoyada 2017; Ben-Yehoyada, Cabot, and Silverstein 2020; Horden and Purcell 2000, 2006; Rogozen-Soltar 2020). With the implementation of the EU’s Schengen Agreement in the 1990s, immigration from Africa, the Middle East and other parts of Asia to a ‘borderless’ Europe mushroomed, spurring the construction of the EU’s ‘common borders’ policy marked by the establishment of Frontex border agency in 2004 and the adoption in 2013 of the Dublin regulation that migrants should seek asylum in the country of first arrival (Armstrong and Anderson 2007; Bilgin 2004; De Genova 2017a, 2017b). As southern EU member states, facing the Mediterranean received most sea-borne refugees, and other EU members were loath to accept such maritime ‘asylum seekers’, the southern EU states in conjunction with the EU adopted policies to deter the arrival of refugees via the Mediterranean. Thus, from a zone of connection, the Mediterranean became a border zone separating Europe from its Muslim neighbours to the south and east. The historical presence of Muslims in southern (Spain, Portugal, Greece) and eastern (Balkans) Europe notwithstanding, EU discourse construed North Africa, the Middle East and West Asia as a culturally alien ‘Islamic world’ while simultaneously defining Europe as a ‘Judeo-Christian civilization’ (Akaliyski, Welzel, and Hien 2022; Bărbulescu and Andreescu 2009; Nathan and Topolski 2016; Topolski 2020).

The coincidental perception of ‘Muslim migration’ as a threat to this ‘Judeo-Christian civilization’ offered a justification for the ‘Fortress Europe’ approach. In contravention of international maritime law, the EU border protection agency Frontex is on record of having pushed back migrants, contracting North-African coast guards in order to turn back migrants and discouraging fishers, freighters and rescue operators from picking up drowning migrants. This effectively transforms the Mediterranean into a weaponised border zone – a wide and deep moat that is excessively dangerous to cross, resulting in an average ‘official’ death toll of 2300 per year (not counting unregistered dead), which since 2015 has led many commentators to call the Mediterranean a ‘massive graveyard’ (Heller and Pezzani 2017; Koenig 2018; Tyrikos-Ergas 2016). Ironically, the Italian coast guard called its 2013–4 operation Mare Nostrum after the ancient Roman name for the Mediterranean,⁹ but given the thousands of drowned refugees, it might more precisely be called sepulcrum nostrum [our graveyard] harbouring the unburied dead whose death must ensure the cultural integrity of Europe. In a cynical pun, Christoph Büchel called his aforementioned installation of the vessel of death at the 2019 Venice Biennale Barca Nostra [our boat], thus wryly referencing the Romans’ Mare nostrum –a toponym of the past – and the Italian coast guard’s 2013–4 operation, while denouncing the EU’s abdication of responsibility for what is happening on and in the Mediterranean.

The documentary and memorial projects by artists like Ai Weiwei (Safe Passage and Human Flow, 2016–7); Đỉnh Q. Lê (The Deep Blue Sea); and Christoph Büchel (Barca Nostra) seek to counter the anonymity and oblivion of refugees drowned in the aquatic flux of the sea, yet these artists materialise their commemoration on land. In the frequent absence of dead bodies and specific grave sites on the ‘high seas’, they, as well as other artists, make claims regarding the humanity, singularity and memorability of the human lives of refugees drowned at sea, as I show below. But before delving into these contemporary art projects I need to unpack the temporal and spatial connections between contemporary art and cultural heritage.

Heritage temporalities and spatialities

The museum world classifies the world in natural (natural history museums) and human (cultural history and art museums) realms (Bennett et al. 2017). Within the human realm, cultural history and art museums are usually predicated on a spatial classification of the world in cities and regions, nation-states, and (sub)continents (Anderson 2006 ; Hall 1999; Levitt 2015; Salemink 2023). Those museums – like the British Museum, the Louvre and the Metropolitan – that deny such classifications apply to themselves as they make universalist claims on behalf of the whole of humanity and of the planet are usually located in former and present centres of empire. In other words, claims to universal authority to validate universal value are based on a history and presence of political-economic and military hegemony or at least dominance. Debates about the repatriation of such objects as the Parthenon Marbles, the Benin bronzes or the 12 old Summer Palace bronze heads revolve around the question whether these objects are the legitimate property of the nations from where they originate or whether they are the property of humanity at large under the stewardship of universalising museums in the Global North (Hicks 2020).

Within the broad category of visual art and cultural history, in his magisterial The Invention of Art Larry Shiner (2001) sketches the historical development within Europe of a category of fine art created by individual ‘geniuses’, as distinct from craft and non-European, ‘ethnographic’ and ‘oriental’ art allegedly created by collectives and governed by tradition. Initially consisting mostly of sculpture and painting, the category of fine art expanded in the twentieth century to include other mediums (architecture, design, fashion), new technologies (photography, film, video, Internet), and new modalities (performance, installation). With the move towards decolonisation in the art world, ‘ethnographic’ and ‘oriental’ objects historically created outside of European art history are increasingly recognised as artistically equivalent to the work created by European ‘geniuses’ (Gell 1996, 1998; Price 2007). Similarly, contemporary art produced by artists from outside Euro-America – including Indigenous artists – is no longer written off as derivative as these artists are no longer denied coevalness with Euro-American artists (Fabian 1983; Salemink 2023).

When juxtaposing this brief excursion into the global art world with theories of heritage, we might offer a simple temporal classification based on the connections between art, museums and cultural heritage – or at least on many modalities of these categories. The category of art is commonly applied to material objects that could be archaeological, historical, ethnographic, as well as modern and contemporary. (For reasons of space, I leave out the archaeological, historical and architectural sites and so-called intangible heritage as well as embodied, performative art from this discussion and focus on movable art objects.) Since around 1800 museums have been the most visible and important technology of collecting, housing, conserving and displaying such objects, there is a correlation between museum and art classifications (as in ethnographic or modern art museums, cf. Bennett et al. 2017). As Benedict Anderson and many others after him argued, in the age of nation-states, museums were and are necessary showcases of the cultural accomplishments of nations (Anderson 2006 ; Levitt 2015). In other words, museums often displayed the objects in their possession as the cultural heritage of the nations where these museums were located, especially the older archaeological and historical objects; and in some cases, the museum buildings themselves were considered cultural heritage as well because of their architectural prowess (Sejrup 2023). Put simply, museums housed and showcased the material heritage of nations and – in the case of universalising museums – of empires.

Temporally speaking, such older objects materialised the historical roots of nations left over from the past and considered the heritage of the nation in the present. This leaves the artistic production of the recent past and present outside the umbrella of heritage, as contemporary art is not often thought of in terms of heritage. Yet, museums and archaeologists must in the present make decisions about what to collect, conserve and classify for display in the future as part of what Irene Stengs fortuitously calls ‘anticipatory heritage’ (Harrison et al. 2020; Holtorf and Högberg 2021; Stengs 2018; see also Hamilakis 2016). Put differently, the work of curators and conservators may transform the contemporary art of the present into the heritage of the future, and this temporal dimension puts the memorialisation and commemoration projects by contemporary artists of refugees drowned in the Mediterranean in a future-oriented heritage perspective: the artists deliberately create the heritage of the future.

Because of the materiality of the sea, however, it is difficult to construct or place memorial art in the places where the refugees drowned, if these exact places are known in the first place. Therefore, the intended public is not families and friends left behind by drowned refugees, given their inability to access the material.¹⁰ In her essay on ‘The Oceanic Turn: Submarine futures of the anthropocene’, Elizabeth DeLoughrey argues that ‘the violence of transoceanic colonial history as well as immersion in the materiality of the ocean itself’ requires ‘temporalising the sea […] because unlike terrestrial space – where one might memorialise and narrativise a space into place – the perpetual circulation of ocean currents means that the sea dissolves phenomenological experience, and defracts the accumulation of narrative’ (DeLoughrey 2016, 243–244). Spatially, this future maritime heritage is not lying on the seabed, but neither does it explicitly refer to the nation where it is located. Instead, the spatio-temporal liminality of the refugees’ perilous sea journey is made temporally perennial as future heritage through its materialisation in art objects, often on land.

The next section moves our analytical gaze from the temporal transformation of contemporary art into commemorative maritime heritage – in the future – to the spatial emplacement of this maritime heritage, usually on land.

Commemorative emplacements

Paradoxically, my first real-life encounters with contemporary art memorialising the tragedy unfolding in the Mediterranean were when I was working on a project on the global embedding of the Chinese contemporary ‘art ecosystem’ (the expression preferred by curators) and global processes of hierarchical artistic valuation (see Salemink et al. 2023), and hence were far removed from the Mediterranean. When attending the Art Basel Hong Kong art fair in March 2017, my eyes were drawn to Vietnamese-American artist Đỉnh Q. Lê’s installation The Deep Blue Sea consisting of giant, elongated prints of iconic photos of refugee boats in the Mediterranean draped in a square – a technique that he had applied earlier to iconic photos of the Vietnam-American War era.¹¹ Later that year in June 2017, the first meeting of the international advisory board of my project Global Europe took place in Copenhagen, right at the time of Ai Weiwei’s installation Soleil Levant consisting of 3500 life vests mounted in the windows of Kunsthal Charlottenborg in the centre of Copenhagen (see Figure 1)¹²; the use of orange life jackets became a common trope in artworks commenting on the ‘refugee crisis’ (Tyrikos-Ergas 2016). During the Art Basel Hong Kong art week in March 2018, the Tang Contemporary Art Gallery in Hong Kong hosted Ai Weiwei’s show Refutation, which took up a number of themes of Ai’s 2017 movie Human Flow about the plight of refugees around the world.¹³ I will explore Đỉnh Q. Lê’s and Ai Weiwei’s artworks in the next section; in this section, I explore the emplacement of commemorative artworks by distinguishing three locations: in the sea, on a landside destination for refugees, and at an international art event.

Figure 1. Ai Weiwei’s installation consisting of discarded life vests at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, June 2017 (photo by author).

The so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in the Mediterranean provoked a veritable art boom on this topic (Breene 2016; Carasthatis and Tsilimpounidi 2020; Ramsay 2016).¹⁴ Even the Vatican inaugurated a sculpture ‘Angels Unawares’ dedicated to migrants in St. Peter’s Square.¹⁵ Some artworks seek to visually represent the migrant journey or the drowned refugees themselves, sometimes by collecting and exhibiting left behind objects, whereas other artists document in painstaking detail migrants and their journeys, like Bouchra Khalili in her Mapping Journey Project at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (Nicolaou 2020). Both artistic approaches seek to memorialise living or drowned refugees. Many memorial monuments – like World War I cemeteries in France, or former concentration camps in Poland – are located at the exact sites of death of the commemorated people. In the sea, World War II shipwrecks are sometimes consecrated – and desecrated – as ‘maritime military graves’,¹⁶ but memorial artworks are seldom located under the surface of the sea, because its materiality renders emplacement as well as public access at the exact site of drowning difficult. One exception is the underwater sculptures by the artist Jason deCaires Taylor referencing the Middle Passage of enslaved people (located off Cancun, Mexico) and the refugees drowned in the Mediterranean (located off Lanzarote, Canary Islands). Much like shipwrecks (sea Pearson this issue), these artworks that visually represent (drowned) human beings become sites of marine efflorescence, almost like coral reefs (Hüpkes and Dürbeck 2021; Meyers 2020). This combination of visual representation of human tragedy with natural processes makes for stunning sights for those able to dive and look. The main sculpture in the underwater Museo Atlántico off Lanzarote consists of a raft of refugees made in cement on the seabed and titled The Raft of Lampedusa – a simultaneous reference to Géricault’s famous shipwreck painting Raft of the Medusa and to the island of Lampedusa’s prominence as a destination for refugees.¹⁷

Both submarine locations – Cancun and Lanzarote – are far away from the referenced sites in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, respectively but are instead located at tourist destinations where one can expect a tourist audience willing and able to dive to see the artworks.¹⁸ The Middle Passage in the Atlantic and the present-day Mediterranean have in common that the exact locations of drowning, human remains and sunken ships are not known and are usually located too deep for diving access. In the words of Elizabeth DeLoughrey, deCaires Taylor’s maritime memorial sculptures ‘reflect lost lives of the past’ in ‘an act of anticipatory mourning’ (DeLoughrey 2016, 247), but without a diving audience there can be no mourning subjects – or mourners. Thus, the current locations of deCaires Taylor’s underwater sculptures highlight the importance of access and – in connection – of a gazing public. But Taylor did not intend the underwater installation as ‘a tribute or memorial to the many lives lost but as a stark reminder of the collective responsibility of our now global community’,¹⁹ i.e. as a forward-looking reminder rather than a backward-looking memorial.

DeCaires Taylor’s underwater sculptures are exceptional because of their location and emplacement at the seabed. It is more common to find memorial artworks on land, primarily at those sites that demarcate the migratory journey, such as points of departure or intended destinations. One of the earlier and most iconic memorial artworks is Porta de Lampedusa – Porta d’Europa on the Italian island of Lampedusa, which because of its proximity to the North African coast is a main destination for refugees departing from Libya and Tunisia (see Figure 2). Commissioned by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Mimmo Paladino’s sculpture in the form of a gate overlooks since 2008 the entrance to the harbour, as ‘a monument for the migrants deceased and lost at sea’ [un monumento per i migranti deceduti e disperse in mare], after thousands of refugees had perished in the preceding two decades. The Porta d’Europa is one of the memorial artworks on migrants and refugees that is featured in the website of the Accademia Diritto e Arte [ADiA], the artistic branch of the Accademia Diritto Migrazione [ADiM], an Italian research group dedicated to study of, and activism on behalf of, migrants and refugees in a European context.²⁰

Figure 2. Porta d’Europa in Lampedusa, December 2020 (photo by Domenico Paladino, wikimedia commons).

The Porta de Lampedusa constitutes a gate covered with yellow ceramic tiles depicting hands outstretched as well as items that could be left behind by drowned refugees, such as shoes – thus underlining the humanity of the refugees.²¹ Its location at the harbour of Lampedusa is, of course, highly significant. Lampedusa is a destination both for migrants and tourists, and because every year it receives many thousands of refugees it is also a focal point of humanitarian, political and media attention, thus enhancing the potential public for Porta de Lampedusa. Exceeding its local moorings, as Porta d’Europa, the sculpture makes a visual, nominal and moral appeal to a public beyond the island of Lampedusa, which is projected as the gateway to Europe. In other words, Porta d’Europa is intended as the materialisation of the moral responsibility of the entire population of the EU for the drowning of refugees in the Mediterranean. Yet, it is precisely the location of this gateway on the island of Lampedusa that makes this effect possible: on the one hand, it is located on a ‘European’ island in the Mediterranean that is closest to the coast of North Africa and hence a main destination for refugees; on the other hand, its location affords a public beyond the island of Lampedusa, namely an Italian, European, or even global public.

But not all memorial artworks are located at sites that have any intrinsic connection with the sites of passage or drowning.²² Perhaps the most conspicuous and controversial such memorial artwork is Barca Nostra. Barca Nostra is an installation by the Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph Büchel at the 2019 Venice Biennale (see Figure 3). The installation simply consists of the boat in which many hundreds of refugees in 2015 died in one of the most tragic events in the post-war Mediterranean, as alluded to above. The Italian coast guard found the location of the sunken boat and salvaged it along with the many human remains inside the hull. After the completion of the investigation and the burial of the drowned refugees, the Italian authorities agreed to hand the wreck to Christoph Büchel for artistic purposes. Büchel then transported the wreck to Venice and emplaced it on a quay, without further curatorial elaboration. On the official website of the Biennale Barca Nostra was described as follows:

Figure 3. Barca Nostra at Venice Biennale, 2019 (photo by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra, Wikimedia Commons).

‘Barca Nostra, a collective monument and memorial to contemporary migration, is not only dedicated to the victims and the people involved in its recovery, but also represents the collective policies and politics that create these kinds of disasters’.²³

Like Porta d’Europa, Barca Nostra points at collective policies of weaponising the materiality of the Mediterranean to keep refugees out of Europe, and hence at ‘our’ shared responsibility for such tragedies.

In 2019, Barca Nostra was one of the most controversial artworks worldwide, but not because of its political message; on the contrary, critics took aim at the lack of an explicit political contextualisation. The wreck was exhibited without explanatory panels at the explicit request of Büchel himself, who was largely absent and hardly offered any artistic or curatorial statements. This lack of contextualisation – these days a must in contemporary art – invited criticism of the artwork as an ‘Instagram grab’ at a ‘magnificent carnival of visual consumption’, or even ‘refugee porn’, and without explanation many visitors to the Biennale indeed saw just a wrecked ship, nothing more.²⁴ Writing for iNews, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown charged that ‘Büchel simply used the dispossessed on the high seas to flaunt his artistic and political nihilism’.²⁵

The closure of the Biennale in November 2019 did not end the controversy. In contravention of the agreements with the Biennale and with the Sicilian town that lent him the use of the wreck, Büchel did not organise the removal of the wreck, and Venice authorities experienced trouble contacting Büchel to that effect. While the wreck was eventually removed after a year, this episode cast doubts on the intentions of the artist as potentially self-aggrandising. That charge had to do with Barca Nostra as being at the intersection between the political project of memorialising refugees – as a memorial artwork that was itself short-lived – and Büchel’s name and position in the commercial global art market (Bethwaite and Kangas 2018). In other words, Büchel was accused of promoting himself rather than genuinely memorialising drowned refugees. Again, the location matters as the Venice Biennale is one of the world’s main art events, drawing a public of art and museum professionals, wealthy collectors, art writers, art afficionados and tourists. Temporally speaking, the very ephemerality of the Biennale undermines any commemorative claims for Barca Nostra; the Biennale is primarily an occasion for artists to exhibit themselves for a public that determines their value in the global art world (Bourdieu 1993; Salemink 2023).

Paladino, deCaires Taylor and Büchel are just three of the dozens of well- or lesser-known artists who created artworks that critiqued the perceived inhumanity of EU migration policies, memorialised the drowned victims and/or sought to highlight our common responsibility. While I could have selected many other artworks, the location of their artworks – on the seabed, but far removed from the ‘action’; at a destination point; and at an (temporary) upscale international art event – enables us to reflect on the importance of location for the credibility of memorialisation and for the creation of a relevant audience. In the next section, I discuss two artists who themselves identify as migrants and refugees, namely Ai Weiwei and Đỉnh Q. Lê.

Refugee artists

The activist contemporary artist Ai Weiwei has almost become a household name among the chattering classes in the West, partly because of his dissident status in China which in 2011 landed him in prison for 3 months. After he was allowed to leave China in 2015, he moved to Europe and almost immediately resumed his activism there, but this time directed at Europe’s treatment of refugees during the so-called ‘refugee crisis’. The picture of the 3-year-old toddler Aylan Kurdi lying face-down on a pebble beach in Turkey in September 2015 illustrated the human tragedy and shocked the European public. In early 2016 Ai shut down his ‘Ruptures’ show at the Faurschou Foundation in Copenhagen in protest against a Danish law enabling authorities to take property from refugees. But his re-enactment of Aylan Kurdi’s death posture in February 2016 as a performance project for the India Art Fair and its posting on Instagram was very controversial (see Figure 4), with critics calling it ‘bad taste, egotistical victim porn and [an] endless parade of crappy art’, leading The Observer to ask ‘Did Ai Weiwei go too far this time?’ Some critics even claimed that as a Chinese artist he was not in a position to criticise Europe’s migration policies.²⁶

Figure 4. Artist Ai Weiwei lying face down in Lesvos in the Aegean sea as a tribute to 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi in a bid to highlight the plight of Syrian refugees (photo by Rohit Chawla, India Today).

But Ai defended himself by embracing his own refugee status not only as a political exile from China but as a ‘child refugee’ when his father, the poet Ai Qing, was exiled with his family including the one-year-old Weiwei in the remote western part of China. In an op-ed piece in The Guardian Ai wrote to ‘know how it feels to live in a camp, robbed of my humanity’.²⁷ Ai visited refugee camps on Lesvos island in Greece in early 2016, just after having been allowed to leave China in late 2015, and collected discarded life vests which he used for an installation wrapping the columns in front of the Konzerthaus Berlin during the Berlinale Film Festival. According to Austrian newspaper Der Standard, ‘with an installation of life vests [he] memorializes the fate of refugees who drowned on their way to Europe’ (my translation).²⁸ He would repeat the idea of using life vests for large-scale installations in a variety of sites, including Copenhagen. The paradox of memorialisation through ephemeral artworks right after his own arrival from China suggests that his identification with refugees in Europe was visceral rather than cerebral.

In subsequent years, he developed his artistic analysis and output in more detail through his documentary film Human Flow, for which he visited refugee camps in 23 countries, and which was nominated for an Oscar and through a series of large-scale installations of inflatable rubber boats with refugees, exhibited under different names at different venues (see Figure 5).²⁹ A German documentary that followed Ai during the making of his film called him ‘China’s most famous, displaced artist’ and claimed that he drew ‘on his experiences as a displaced person’ while creating the film.³⁰ But that simplistic equation was rejected by himself in the original reportage by India Today about his Aylan Kurdi re-enactment: ‘I don’t see myself as a refuge because I’ve got my passport and can travel freely, and I’m better than refugees that have lost their lives’. Rather than highlighting the plight of refugees per se, he aims to highlight our common humanity by emphasising that ‘there’s no refugee crisis, only a human crisis’.³¹ In other words, Ai stresses that empathy for refugees should not depend on one’s own background and experience – as a refugee, fixed resident, or person of privilege – and that our common humanity should suffice to act with compassion. His artworks, then, are reactions to global phenomena like migration and, as such, as calls to action rather than commemorative devices.

Figure 5. Ai Weiwei’s installation refutation at Tang Contemporary Art, Hong Kong, March 2018 (photo by author).

Đỉnh Q. Lê’s artwork, whose artwork The Deep Blue Sea I encountered at the Art Basel Hong Kong art fair in 2017, was less ambivalent than Ai Weiwei’s, as Lê’s entire oeuvre tends to engage deeply with memory and history (see Figure 6). Lê was born close to the Cambodian border in southern Vietnam in 1968 and fled with his family from the violence of the Vietnamese-Cambodian conflict in 1977 to end up in America. Trained as a contemporary artist in the US, he returned in 1996 to live in Vietnam and work with Vietnamese artists. While not eschewing installation and video art, his main speciality is the weaving of large, elongated prints cut in narrow threads, using the traditional Vietnamese grass mat-weaving techniques that had learned as a child in southern Vietnam. Choosing iconic photos of the Vietnamese-American War or of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, Lê integrates history as captured in photos with his heritage and memory as someone raised in southern Vietnam.

Figure 6. Đỉnh Q. Lê’s installation the Deep Blue Sea at art Basel Hong Kong, March 2017 (photo by author).

The Vietnamese-American War – and to a lesser extent the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime – gave rise to a wide array of commemorative sites and practices on various sides of the conflict. For American former soldiers, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a site of pilgrimage and commemoration (Sturken 1991), while the current communist regime in Vietnam fills the landscape with memorial sites, including cemeteries (Salemink 2022; Schwenkel 2009). For the Vietnamese diaspora in North America, Europe and Australia, such sites are less easy to pinpoint as most of them came as so-called boat refugees – much like the present-day refugees in the Mediterranean. Most of these boat people spent years or even decades in refugee camps in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia or elsewhere in the region, before being allowed to migrate to western countries. Quan Tue Tran (2012) relates the efforts of diasporic Vietnamese to establish memorials in two of these camps, in Malaysia and Indonesia, from 2005 onward. Led by Buddhist monks, the delegations prayed for ‘the spirits of refugees who had died in the camp and in the South China Sea’ (Tran 2012, 84), whose number is estimated to be around half a million and whose ‘collective sacrifice will never be forgotten’ (Tran 2012, 92). Another such ‘site’ is the Tự Do [lit. ‘Freedom’], a small fishing boat that in 1977 arrived in the harbour of Darwin with 31 Vietnamese refugees, and that was ‘made over and repurposed as a heritage object’ (Byrne 2016, 282), i.e. as a memorial for those who made it safely to Australia.

Đỉnh Q. Lê early work engaged official history – as documented in photos – as well as the popular history mediated by Hollywood – from which Vietnamese voices were largely absent – by constructing a counternarrative based on ‘our memories’ (Le 2005, 24). Lê’s work is usually interpreted as ‘acts of repair or a kind of memorial’ (Taylor 2017, commenting on his show at dOCUMENTA 13), with ‘identity, memory and history [as] concepts that continue to permeate Lê’s works and installations’ (Luong 2013, 167). In her intermittent dialogue with Lê, Moira Roth quotes Lê’s description of his exhibition inspired by the Arab Spring; ‘Chúng ta không thể quên: We must not forget’ (Roth 2015, 158). In her review of Lê’s show Mot Coi Di Ve [A realm of leaving and returning]³² in the Bellevue Arts Museum in Washington DC, Eleanor Ray emphasises Lê’s traditional grassmat-weaving technique, learned as a child in southern Vietnam, as an ‘authentic’ craft that can be juxtaposed to ‘innovative’ art, thereby transcending the art/craft dichotomy (Ray 2008). In a review of Đỉnh Q. Lê’s recent exhibition entitled Photographing the thread of memory in the Musée du quai Branly, the prominent ethnographic museum in Paris, Magali Berthon (2023) suggests that the technique of woven photographs becomes a way of dealing with history and memory, of memorialisation.

Đỉnh Q. Lê’s installation at the 2017 instalment of the Art Basel Hong Kong art fair transposed his unique technique of elongating iconic photographs – in this case of refugees seeking to cross the Mediterranean in a crowded boat – to an issue dear to Lê’s heart, namely the plight of refugees. Using four well-known images circulating in cybersphere, Lê materialises them again as 50-metre-long prints and turns them into a large-scale three-dimensional installation intended to – in Lê’s own words – ‘put [the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean] in your face’ (Ha Thuc 2017, no page). As with his other work, Lê is asking viewers to not to forget and to embrace the moral obligation to record and remember (Ha Thuc 2017). At the same time, Lê targets an audience of wealthy art afficionados attending this upscale, übercommercial art fair, which is not only a far cry from the desperation experienced by Mediterranean refugees but also from the European public that could change their plight. There is a temporal consideration as well, as the installation is erected for a short-term event and therefore too ephemeral for a memorial, unless the installation ends up in a museum.

Partly rooted in their personal experience as (former) refugees, both Ai Weiwei’s and Đỉnh Q. Lê’s artworks offer trenchant commentary on the plight of refugees in the Mediterranean and the responsibility scorned by surrounding states and the EU. Both artists, but especially Đỉnh Q. Lê, seek to memorialise the refugee journey and commemorate the drowned victims, but given the short temporalities of their artworks, it is as yet unclear whether these artworks could become future heritage. For that to happen, the artwork should be acquired by museums, which would more likely be contemporary art museums than maritime or cultural history museums. In other words, regardless of the intentions of the artists, their artwork is ambivalent as maritime heritage, and their future status and reception would depend on their future locations and publics – in contrast with the artworks by Mimmo Paladino and Jason deCaires Taylor – and in that sense, the career of their artworks mirrors their own careers as mobile refugee artists.

Conclusion

In this article, I zoom in on just a few of the contemporary artists who seek to comment on the plight of refugees crossing the Mediterranean, and in particular to commemorate drowned refugees. These artworks happen to be ones that I encountered or that are representative for specific locations, but they are by no means the only or the first ones memorialising the refugees drowned in the Mediterranean. As memorials, many such contemporary artworks have the explicit long-term aim of enabling the remembrance of drowned refugees in the present as well as in some unspecified time in the future. Temporally, then, such contemporary art seeks to deliberately become heritage over time as ‘anticipatory heritage’ (Stengs 2018) and thus escape the presentist regime of historicity characterising the heritage regime (Hartogh 2015; Holtorf and Högberg 2021, 2). Yet, some of the artworks discussed lack the longevity needed to attain the status of memorial in the future, especially the works by Đỉnh Q. Lê, Ai Weiwei and Christoph Büchel – although they may attain such longevity if they are acquired by museums or – in the case of Christoph Büchel’s Barca Nostra – if the Sicilian town where the wreck eventually returned turns it into a monument. For the three artists, I mentioned that the ephemerality of their artworks was linked up with their exhibition at temporary art events and hence with the targeted audience of art afficionados frequenting biennales and art fairs. In addition, the refugee background of artists like Ai Weiwei and Đỉnh Q. Lê seemed to wed the artists’ mobility to the ephemerality of their artworks, thus making for temporally complex connections between artist, artworks, the materiality of their commemorative projects, and targeted audiences. Temporally speaking, then, the verdict is out whether the commemorative artworks discussed will become future heritage, i.e. will in the future be seen as the cultural heritage of our times.

Spatially, most artworks – with the exception of deCaires Taylor’s underwater museum – are located on land, even if they refer to tragic events occurring at sea. However, their terrestrial locations do not detract from their maritime status, much like maritime museums are labelled ‘maritime’ not because they are in or on the sea but because they cover maritime practices of humans in past and present. In fact, it is the materiality of the sea itself – liquid, unfixed and ever in flux – that largely precludes the possibility of commemorative projects targeting present and future publics. In other words, most art projects memorialising drowned refugees are not maritime heritage because of the submarine location of the artwork but because it refers to events and sites at sea, and in order to become the heritage of the future accessible to future publics, such artworks must themselves be located on stable moorings that the sea cannot afford. Therefore, given the sea’s aquatic materiality, the commemorative claims of these art projects require that commemorative materialisations must spatially move from the flux of the sea to the fixity of the land. In this regard, I would suggest that art that explicitly commemorates the maritime tragedies befalling thousands of refugees crossing the Mediterranean be considered a maritime heritage of the future, regardless of the marine or terrestrial location of the artworks.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 802223 Transoceanic Fishers: Multiple Mobilities in and out of the South China Sea - TransOcean - ERC -2018-StG). The research for this article was also supported by the Denmarks Frie Forskningsfond [Sapere Aude Advanced Grant] awarded to Oscar Salemink.

Notes on contributors

Oscar Salemink

Oscar Salemink (1958–2023) was a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. Between 2001 and 2011 he worked at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, from 2005 as Professor of Social Anthropology, and from 1996 through 2001 he was responsible for Ford Foundation grant portfolios in social sciences and arts and culture in Thailand and Vietnam. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Amsterdam, based on research on Vietnam’s Central Highlands. His most recent work and global projects focused on heritage and contemporary arts. He published two monographs, ten edited volumes, and six themed issues of journals. His recent books are Sacralization of Heritage: Validating, authenticating and managing religious heritage and Global Art in Local Art Worlds: De-centering and Re-centering Europe in the Global Hierarchy of Value and Management of Religion (open access at https://www.routledge.com/Global-Art-in-Local-Art-Worlds-Changing-Hierarchies-of-Value/Salemink-Correa-Sejrup-Nielsen/p/book/9780367653279).

Notes

1. Statement made by Angela Markel ‘Wir schaffen das’. Available at: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wir_schaffen_das (accessed March 22, 2023).

2. ‘Genocide’ charged as boat capsizes in Mediterranean”. Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/19/africa/italy-migrant-boat-capsizes/index.html (accessed March 22, 2023).

3. ‘Death of Alan Kurdi’. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Alan_Kurdi (accessed March 22, 2023).

4. ‘2023 Calabria migrant boat disaster’. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Calabria_migrant_boat_disaster (accessed March 23, 2023).

5. ‘Ai Weiwei poses as drowned Syrian child Alan Kurdi in photograph’. Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/ai-weiwei-alan-kurdi-syria/index.html (accessed March 23, 2023).

6. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barca_Nostra (accessed March 23, 2023).

7. For a lucid and helpful distinction between marine and maritime, see Roszko (2021).

8. Fishers, freighters and rescue operators are subject to Frontex discipline on the high seas, meaning that in contravention to maritime law they are strongly discouraged or forbidden to pick up drowning migrants; See ‘EU border agency “has failed to protect asylum seekers” rights’, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/15/eu-border-agency-has-failed-to-protect-asylum-seekers-rights; ‘“I was close to death”: Syrian man tells how Greek officials pushed refugees back out to sea’, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/31/i-was-close-to-death-syrian-man-tells-how-greek-officials-pushed-refugees-back-out-to-sea; and ‘Aid workers say Mediterranean a “liquid graveyard” after 75 feared dead off Libya’, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/22/aid-workers-say-mediterranean-a-liquid-graveyard-after-75-feared-dead-off-libya (accessed March 23, 2023).

9. ‘Mare Nostrum Operation’ Available at: https://www.marina.difesa.it/EN/operations/Pagine/MareNostrum.aspx (accessed March 23, 2023).

10. However, this situation may alter over time for those ‘successful’ refugees, migrants, and their descendants in ways that may well parallel current the expansion of the art canon (which arguably is part of global heritage) towards the inclusion of female, Black, Asian, queer/LGBT artists of past and present in ‘permanent’ museum exhibitions. Nonetheless, it remains too early to know whether, and in what form, this anticipatory heritage will ‘materialise’.

11. See https://www.cobosocial.com/dossiers/the-deep-blue-sea/ and ‘Dinh Q. Lê’s Deep Blue See at Art Basel Hong Kong’, available at: https://artisalive.co.uk/2017/03/26/dinh-q-les-deep-blue-see-at-art-basel-hong-kong/ (accessed 31 March 2023).

12. See https://kunsthalcharlottenborg.dk/da/udstillinger/ai-weiwei-soleil-levant/. Other, similar installations by Ai Weiwei of life vests mounted to structures took place in Berlin, February 2016 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ai-weiwei-life-jackets-installation-berlin-427247, and Quebec City, August 2022 https://www.dezeen.com/2022/08/16/ai-weiwei-life-jackets-quebec-city/# (accessed March 31, 2023).

13. See https://www.tangcontemporary.com/refutationen (accessed April 1, 2023).

14. See ‘Mediterranean Sea: migrant routes in art’, available at: https://www.artmajeur.com/en/magazine/5-art-history/mediterranean-sea-migrant-routes-in-art/331639; ‘Art and the refugee “crisis”: Mediterranean blues’, available at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/art-and-refugee-crisis-mediterranean-blues/; ‘Manifesta 12: The Dark Heart of the Biennial Shows Human Suffering Out of Control’, available at: https://www.frieze.com/article/manifesta-12-dark-heart-biennial-shows-human-suffering-out-control; ‘At Manifesta, Artists Address Italy’s Migrant Crisis’, available at: https://hyperallergic.com/459887/at-manifesta-artists-address-italys-migrant-crisis/; and ‘Ai Weiwei covers historic Quebec City rampart in refugee life jackets’https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/artworks-migration-2019 (accessed April 1, 2023).

15. ‘Vatican sculpture dedicated to migrants unveiled’, available at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49886953 (accessed April 1, 2023).

16. ‘Ministry of Defence condemns “desecration” of Royal Navy wrecks’, available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-65724795 (accessed May 30, 2023).

17. See https://underwatermuseumlanzarote.com/en/info-museo-atlantico/; “Europe’s first underwater sculpture museum – in pictures, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2016/feb/02/europes-first-underwater-sculpture-museum-in-pictures (accessed May 30, 2023); Meyers (2020).

18. See Jason deCaires Taylor, available at: https://www.underwatersculpture.com/ (accessed May 30, 2023).

19. ‘Museum under the Sea’, available at: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=682951778512999 (accessed May 30, 2023).

20. For an overview of artworks in the database, see https://www.migrazionieuropadiritto.it/atlante-adia/atlante-adia-opere/ (accessed April 2, 2023).

21. In Auschwitz the exhibition of objects left behind by Holocaust victims produces a highly emotive effect.

22. For example, there are Holocaust memorials in many different countries where the Holocaust did not take place, or that were (directly) affected by the Holocaust. Sometimes, there are hardly Holocaust survivors or descendants living in countries with such memorials. Similarly, many (North-Atlantic) countries have (maritime) museums that in the present day and age pay attention to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, sometimes in places with only tenuous connections to historical enslavement and slavery. Usually, the rationale for paying attention to and – indeed – commemorating these horrific events is to educate (privileged, liberal) publics around the world about these events and their historical aftermaths. In other words, sites and objects of memorialisation and commemoration do not necessarily or exclusively have to be in places close to where the events occurred nor have to exclusively address publics that are direct descendants of those people whose plight is commemorated.

23. See https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2019/partecipants/christoph-b%C3%BCchel (accessed 1 April 2023).

24. ‘Wrecked migrant ship displayed by Christhoph Büchel returns to Sicily as memorial’, available at: https://www.artforum.com/news/migrant-ship-displayed-by-christoph-buechel-returns-to-sicily-as-memorial-85537; ‘A migrant ship with tragic history is at the Venice Biennale. A new migrant boat sinking shows its more than a relic’, available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/05/10/migrant-ship-with-tragic-history-is-venice-biennale-new-migrant-boat-sinking-shows-its-more-than-relic/; ‘Fierce debate over Christhop Büchel’s Venice Biennale display of boat that sank with hundreds locked in hull’, available at: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2019/05/14/fierce-debate-over-christoph-buchels-venice-biennale-display-of-boat-that-sank-with-hundreds-locked-in-hull; and ‘We’ve chosen the best of the art in Venice, now here’s the worst’, available at: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2019/05/10/weve-chosen-the-best-of-the-art-in-venice-now-heres-the-worst (accessed May 30, 2023).

25. ‘The best art is built on morality – the Venice Biennale’s migrant boat is not’, available at: https://inews.co.uk/opinion/venice-biennale-migrant-boat-christoph-buchel-morality-290815 (accessed at May 30, 2023).

26. ‘Artist awash in the land of refugees’, available at: https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/special-report/story/20160215-ai-weiwei-tribute-to-syrian-refugee-aylan-kurdi-828413–2016-02-03; ‘Ai Weiwei poses as drowned Syrian Infant refugee in “hunting” photo’, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/feb/01/ai-weiwei-poses-as-drowned-syrian-infant-refugee-in-haunting-photo; and ‘Ai Weiwei hits a New Low by Crassly Recreating photo of Drawned Syrian Toddler’, available at: https://news.artnet.com/market/ai-weiwei-reenactment-drowned-syrian-toddler-417275 (accessed at May 30, 2023).

27. ‘Ai Weiwei makes bold statement about the refugee crisis with giant inflatable boat’, available at: https://mashable.com/article/ai-weiwei-biennale-of-sydney; and ‘The refugee crisis isn’t about refugees. It is about us’, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/02/refugee-crisis-human-flow-ai-weiwei-china (accessed May 30, 2023).

28. ‘Berliner Konzerthaus: Ai Weiwei erinnert mit Schwimmwesten an ertrunkene Flüchtlinge [Berlin Concert Hall: Ai Weiwei remembers drowned refugees with life jackets]’, available at: https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000031064535/berliner-konzerthaus-ai-weiwei-erinnert-mit-schwimmwesten-an-fluechtlinge?ref=rss#forumstart (accessed May 30, 2023).

29. ‘Ai Weiwei makes bold statement about the refugee crisis with giant inflatable boat’, available at: https://mashable.com/article/ai-weiwei-biennale-of-sydney; and see https://www.tangcontemporary.com/refutationen (accessed May 30, 2023).

30. ‘China most famous, displaced artist’, available at: https://www.dw.com/en/ai-weiwei-drifting-chinas-most-famous-displaced-artist/a-39247206 (accessed May 30, 2023).

31. ‘Artist awash in the land of refugees’, available at: https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/special-report/story/20160215-ai-weiwei-tribute-to-syrian-refugee-aylan-kurdi-828413–2016-02-03; and ‘Ai Weiwei makes bold statement about the refugee crisis with giant inflatable boat’, available at: https://mashable.com/article/ai-weiwei-biennale-of-sydney (accessed May 30, 2023).

32. Vietnamese speakers will recognise this as the title of one of Trịnh Công Sơn’s mót famous songs.