Abstract
“Heritage Spaces, and Digital Archives: ARTivist Acts of Resistance” discusses two distinct examples of collection and memory preservation inspired by the migrant struggles in the Mediterranean: Porto M, an anti-institutional and unconventional “museum” created in Lampedusa by the local collective Askavusa; and the Archive of Migrant Memories (AMM), the online multimedia project maintained by a team of researchers, migrants, fieldworkers, and volunteers based in Rome. Together, they constitute important examples of, what I call in the book, ARTivist practices in the sense in which these have been actualized within the contemporary Chicanx artistic community in the hybridized, transcultural space of the US-Mexico border.
A world in which many worlds could co-exist can only be made by the shared work and common goals of those who inhabit, dwell in one of the many worlds co-existing in one world and where differences are not cast in terms of values of plus and minus degree of humanity.
—Walter Mignolo, “Delinking”
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Notes
- 1.
Combining art and activism, the neologism ARTivism refers to artistic works created with a strong political commitment to social justice. An early manifesto of artivist poetics in the United States can be found in a 1976 issue of Chisme Arte, a publication of the Concilio of arte popular, a statewide advocacy group founded to support the network of Chicano arts organization throughout California. It states: “…it is in this country and in our time that the greatest need for an art form that is not only relevant, but maybe the only relevant thing, lies. It is in this country that art could function as a revolutionary weapon. If revolution is simply no more than society rapidly changing…then, art could be the catalyst that brings about that change, or to put it more modestly, some of that change (Almaraz 50).
- 2.
For major details on the project, see https://smuraremediterraneo.wordpress.com/
- 3.
Crucial to the team’s methodology, as a University located in the Southern region of Apulia, is the affirmation of a “Southern critical thinking” that acknowledges the historical roots of the Mediterranean extending back to Arab, Norman-Swedish, and Greek foundations, “delinking itself” from both Renaissance and Risorgimental history (Zaccaria: 2015, 8).
- 4.
My reflections in this section relate to my onsite visit of Porto M, in September 2018. At time of this writing, the space has expanded its artistic and cultural activities to include performances of the Sicilian tradition opera dei pupi (puppet theater), live music, book presentations, and encounters and conversations with the community on “the migrants’ objects” (https://www.facebook.com/IfiglidiAbele/?ref=page_internal).
- 5.
An eclectic artist, Sferlazzo is one of the founding members of Askavusa. His music reevaluates the artistic character of traditional Sicilian popular music, often relegated to the realm of folklore, with texts that carry a strong political message at the same time as they embody the natural elements of the Lampedusa landscape. His most recent album is titled Marimmensu, a Sicilian term, Sferlazzo explains, referring to the ways in which the Lampedusa residents envision the Mediterranean: “a middle sea” but also “an immense sea,” a liquid motherland whose land seems only the parenthesis of a much larger discourse” (https://www.facebook.com/Marinmenzu/).
- 6.
For a detailed history and evolution of Askavusa, see Vecchi (2016) and Gatta (2016).
- 7.
In a personal e-mail communication, Sferlazzo points out that Askavusa’s decision to constitute itself as a collective, rather than an association, was the result of a desire to create a horizontal political process that, despite its challenges, intends to remain as democratic and participatory as possible (Sferlazzo, E-mail to the author).
- 8.
As I am going to discuss later on, the term museum is somehow inadequate for Porto M, given its anti-institutional agenda. In line with recent postcolonial reconfigurations of museums, I prefer to think of Porto M as a cultural space, a living archive in which other practices of memory are being built. Not just a physical space to preserve a cultural heritage (whose heritage anyway, one might ask?), but an active participant in the current debates on memory, history, and identity. When I asked Sferlazzo about the difficulty in categorizing a space such as Porto M, he replies by saying that “it is just Porto M” (Sferlazzo, E-mail to the author).
- 9.
The restored material consisted of a series of letters, journals, identity documents, religious texts, and various formulae containing passages from the Quran and Christian-Oriental texts rolled up and found inside migrants’ clothes abandoned or thrown away after disembarking. As explained by Professor Triulzi, a key role in the translation work curated by members of the Archive of Migrant Memories has been played by migrants themselves. See Mosca Mondadori, pp. 143–46.
- 10.
Dagmawi Yimer and Zakaria Mohammed Ali were both part of the film festival jury. Originally, the festival intended to promote a counter-narrative of migration by promoting a dialogue between migrants and locals’ realities and focusing on migrants’ self-narration and self-representation. In 2014, Askavusa stopped using the language of cinema in the festival’s critical debates, a decision that has sparked some criticism, and limited the annual event to open forums for the various activist groups involved. On the history of the festival, see Vecchi (2016) and Brambilla (2014).
- 11.
For additional information on the Museum Project in Lampedusa, see Mosca Mondadori et al., pp. 133–46. Tangentially connected to Porto M’s tormented history is another institutionalized project called Toward the Museum of Trust and Dialogue for the Mediterranean, supported by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism, the Region of Sicily, and the Municipality of Lampedusa and Linosa. Inaugurated on the June 3, 2016, by the President of the Italian Republic, through a temporary exhibition of artwork on Mediterranean cultures loaned by important Italian and international museums, this project, located in the building hosting the Archeological Museum of the Pelagie, in central Via Roma, was originally conceived to become the permanent and much desired museum of migrations in Lampedusa. Along with classical artwork such as The Slee** Cupid by Caravaggio, loaned by the “Galleria degli Uffizi” in Florence to commemorate Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian child who was washed ashore the Mediterranean sea in 2015, the temporary exhibit hosted relics from various shipwrecks, including the one in which Alan died. Sadly, at the time of my visit in Lampedusa, the Archeological Museum of the Pelagie was closed. To this day, the dream of institutionalizing a museum of “Trust and Dialogue for the Mediterranean” in Lampedusa remains, as Gatta duly observes, “a failed project” (“Stranded Traces” 181). For further discussion, including photos of the 2016 temporary exhibit in Toward the Museum of Trust and Dialogue, see Vivan, “Le migrazioni.”
- 12.
For a full translation of the poem, see Mazzara (2019): 125–26.
- 13.
Sferlazzo has also composed a song in the Sicilian language dedicated to the Madonna di Porto Salvo. Titled “U santuariu da Madonna di Portu Salvu di Lampedusa,” the song is included in his 2018 album Arrispigghiativi (a Sicilian expression for “Wake Up” (Arrispigghiativi: il nuovo album).
- 14.
At the time of my second visit to Lampedusa, in the summer of 2018, Sferlazzo’s installation was no longer part of the Porto M Exhibit. The wooden statue representing the Madonna with child, Sferlazzo told me, was donated to the Santuario of the Madonna di Porto Salvo, as he had wished for, and is now preserved inside this church (Sferlazzo, E-mail to the author).
- 15.
Sferlazzo interviewed by Mazzara in 2015 (Mazzara: Reframing, 167).
- 16.
At the time of my visit, the Porto M exhibit displayed two large maps, one titled “Island of Lampedusa: Map of the militarization of an island” and the other one, “Encampment Map,” detailing the presence of detention centers in Europe and beyond.
- 17.
My reformulation of digital ARTivism in this chapter places the discourse surrounding the Italy/Libyan border in direct conversation with the US/Mexican one. The term “digital artivism” has been used by Chicanx scholars to describe “a convergence between ‘activism’ and digital ‘artistic’ production.” See Sandoval and Latorre.
- 18.
An abandoned warehouse belonging to the Tiburtina railway station in Rome, which had been occupied by irregular migrants since the late 1990s, provided the “early fieldwork” for the stories gathered at the Asinitas school. In 2006, the railroad reappropriated the premises to start the renovation work and the migrants were forced to move out. “Thinking back,” Triulzi writes, “we must realize that the story of Tiburtina’s squatting days could only be traced by going back to migrants’ own memories. The stations’ grounds were sanitized, but not their memory—not all of it, not it anyway” (“Listening” 64).
- 19.
There is also a Focus section with special attention to Eritrea and Lampedusa (not available in the English version of the website). As not all the content of AMM has been translated into English, my analysis of some of the narratives in the Self-Representations section is based on the website’s Italian page. All the English translations are mine.
- 20.
For a visual critical intervention on the citizenship debate in Italy, see the documentary 18: Ius soli: il diritto di essere italiani (2012) by Afro-Italian filmmaker Fred Kuwornu.
- 21.
Other acts of self-representations in the Archive section include stories by Yimer and Gabriel Tseggai, backstage dialogues from the film C.A.R.A. Italia, directed by Yimer and produced by AMM, a letter written by the brother of one of the victims of the October 3, 2013, Lampedusa tragedy; a diary written by Hassan Ahmed, a Somali who returns to his native country after 27 years; and the story of Hawani Debbea, an Oromo woman who escaped from Ethiopia after the Derg seized power in 1974. Yimer’s “From Addis Ababa to Lampedusa: Story of a Journey” details his voyage from Ethiopia to Italy in spring-summer 2006.
- 22.
See Gatta, Luoghi migranti fra clandestinitá e spazi pubblici, chapter 5. Additional self-reflections on the experience of the narrative circles can be found in the online Italian magazine Lo straniero.
- 23.
A growing body of scholarship on migrant resistance movements has brought attention to the implications of these struggles for the notion of citizenship and borders. See, among others, Tyler and Marciniak, eds. (2014).
- 24.
Echoing Pierre Bourdieu, Engin argues that “the ‘sites’ of citizenship are fields of contestations around which certain issues, interests, stakes, as well as themes, concepts and objects assemble” (“Citizenship in Flux” 370). Such terminology, he further explains, moves us toward a notion of citizenship not so much defined by fixed categories (such as states, nations, cities, sexualities, etc.) but by “fluid and dynamic entities” whose boundaries are always shifting (“Citizenship in Flux” 370).
- 25.
First coined by the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, the concept of public sphere, has been expanded beyond the bourgeoise society of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Europe to include other discursive genres and marginalized areas. For further discussion, see Paolo Jedlowski and Olimpia Affuso, eds. (2010).
- 26.
For further information on the projects in which AMM has been involved, see the section “Progetti” on the website’s Italian version.
- 27.
Whether or not digital media actually achieve such egalitarian goals has been a matter of contested debates. In Baca’s case, Sandoval and Latorre write, although she is “conscious of digital media’s persisting exclusion” of certain ethnic groups, her empowerment of youth of color through digital technology continues, determined, as she is, to explore this media’s full potential (“Chicano/a Artivism” 83).
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A slightly edited version of my discussion of The Archive of Migrant Memories was first published as “Toward a New Poetics and Politics of Migration in Contemporary Italy: The Archive of Migrant Memories as Digital ARTivism.” Anglistica AION: An Interdisciplinary Journal 23.2 (2019): 117–29. I thank the journal editors for permission to reprint.
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Pulitano, E. (2022). Heritage Spaces and Digital Archives: ARTivist Acts of Resistance. In: Mediterranean ARTivism. Mediterranean Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05992-6_7
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