HAND LUGGAGE
To limit the freedom of movement of
human beings is one of the greatest current social injustices.
In the world, every two seconds a
person is forced to leave her or his own house due to conflict or
persecution.
After the shipwreck of Lampedusa on
October 3rd, 2013, in which 368 migrants died, there have been
increased efforts to identify the bodies of people who lost their
lives while crossing the Mediterranean.
Coroners, anthropologists and CSI-units
have started classifying objects, personal belongings, documents
found among the corpses of the migrants.
Today these objects tell stories that
their owners cannot tell anymore.
The long and difficult process that
leads to the identification of a body is crucial to allow families to
cope with their loss, in order to give back dignity to those human
beings who are at risk of becoming figures in the statistics of our
public debates.
Among the objects that are often found
on the corpses – usually in a pocket, in a backpack or even sown
into their clothes – there are small plastic bags containing sand
or soil from their home-country.
Because in the very moment when you
leave your country, your home, your beloved ones, hoping for a better
future, without knowing if and when you'll be back, the act of
carrying with you a few grams of soil is a powerful gesture that
connects you with your memories and your roots.
Over the past five years it is
estimated that at least 32624 people have died on the route that
leads from North Africa to Italy.
THE ARTWORK
Every plastic-bag is accompanied by the
gelocation-coordinates of the area where the soil was retrieved. All
plastic bags look the same, the coordinates are numbers and letters.
This extreme uniformity aims at
stressing that there is no difference between one place and the
other, between one human being and another in the very moment in
which people migrate and leave their place of origin. Without knowing
whether they'll ever come back.
