Description
Migratory movement often leaves traces, despite the many attempts to erase any sign of passage. People are rendered invisible by removing them from public space, through detention and deportation, or even through violence resulting in death. The same applies to the objects they leave behind. Those are regarded as waste, although some escape this fate by becoming pieces of humanitarian art, or clues for forensic efforts to identify their deceased owners. Scholarly analysis of such traces oscillates between observing their production as waste and removal from public view and their production as objects of value and their display.
However, while a significant amount of literature has discussed each of these engagements and read them against one another, little attention has been paid to those moments when they overlap, coexisting on the same objects. In this paper, using the case of “Barca Nostra”, a boat sunk in the Mediterranean and recovered by Italian authorities, I show how this object repeatedly became waste, a body of evidence and a piece of art. I argue that, rather than being mutually exclusive, the different “afterlives” of the boat depend on one another and come together to give a multiple story of migratory movement.
