After nine days full of lectures, meetings, workshops and visits, the second edition of the Meditherity summer school is over.
Now it's time to leave, it's time to say goodbye! Thank you to all the students and lecturers who took part to this unforgettable adventure! See you again in Lampedusa, or elsewhere in the world!
The morning of the last day of our summer school was devoted to Giovanna Di Matteo's seminar about the intersection of memory, volunteering, migration and tourism on Lampedusa and Lesvos. Focusing on this topic by a geographical point of view, Di Matteo discussed how memory spaces are created and co-created through practices, lived experience and the engagement of a collectivity. We need to recognize the dynamicity of these spaces, which can be imbued with different meanings, being open to remembering and forgetting: sites and monuments can be reinterpreted; memorials can be controversial when publicly challenged and contested, thus calling into question the authority of the memorial as appropriate or not. Another central aspect to consider when looking at the nexus between memory and heritage is the fact that tourism is a fundamental part of the emerging regimes of memory. Indeed, tourism plays a fundamental role into the process of creating, preserving and modifying memory and heritage sites.
After this interesting lecture, the PhD studentes enrolled in the summer school had the chance to present and discuss they own ongoing researches that they are currently carrying on. This was another important moment of our summer programme, an useful space for sharing and reflecting about the way young researchers could include in their fields an analysis of the combined impact of migration and tourism.
During the afternoon, all the participants (lecturers and students) had free time to joing the celebrations for Our Lady of Porto Salvo, the patroness of Lampedusa, celebrated every year on September 22nd.
This local feast, that has a strong spiritual meaning as well as a clear socio-political dimension, gave us the opportunity to look at the transformations that have reconfigured the popolar devotion to Our Lady of Porto Salvo over time as a prism through which to analyse the tensions between local dynamics and global forces that affect the island. The visit that Pope Francis paid to Lampedusa in July 2013 contributed significantly to the construction and global dissemination of the discourse about the hospitable, supportive and charitable spirit of the island.
The exhortation to make Lampedusa a “safe port” for migrants represented the first step in defining the “Gospel of Welcome” that has characterised Bergoglio’s pontificate and was symbolically expressed through a specific prayer to Our Lady of Porto Salvo: "Mary, Mother of God and our Mother, Protector of migrants and itinerant people, you offer maternal assistance to the men, women and children forced to flee their lands in search of a future and hope". Just as the Shrine of Cala Madonna has always offered protection and refuge, in Pope Francis' message the whole of Lampedusa must become a "sanctuary", a place of peace, justice, welcome and charity towards displaced people.
The seventh day of MeditHerity 2021 revolved around the subject of the borderland and it was conceptually driven by the morning lecture of Maria Pisani, from the University of Malta.
Although not always in plain sight, both migration and tourism as forms of human mobility are tigthly connected with the establishment and perpetuation of borders. The lecture of Maria Pisani delivered a broad understanding of what “border” might mean and she extended it from the immediate realm of history and politics to the very relationships that occur among humans.
Humanity has always been a mobile species, yet the vocabulary, the issues and the circulation of “crises” and “emergencies” linked to human migration are relatively modern phenomena. Pisani connected these developments to the dawn of border-making policies, which are essentially linked to the appearance of the nation-state form of governance and social-cultural paradigm, first in Europe and then throughout the post-colonial world. “Societies and states are the product of bordering, not the other way around”, could be the recap line of the ways in which from one whole planet, much of humanity ends up grappling, to various degrees, with borderlands.
The lecture traced these developments by following the history of Malta, an insular country whose very position and historical legacy offers a unique window over the intersection of mobility issues – from ancient Mediterranean mobility to colonialism, through the construction of Malta as a modern nation-state, down to tourism and contemporary migratory flows. Maria Pisani stressed the contradiction at the heart of modern globalisation and political-economic system, for which the expansion of travel and technology corresponds to the hardening of international borders. At the same time, the stiffening of such “regimes of division” is not equally borne or experienced. Where tourists are given the privilege to unsee borders, by flying over them or having visa exemptions, migrants are confronted with criminalisation, precarity and, oftentimes, death.
The lecture of Maria Pisani invited us, however, to reflect on the idea of borders not only as a political and cultural fabrication, but also as a manifestation of the ways in which we establish relationships and subjectivities in our everyday conducts. Rather than conceiving persons, including ourselves, as pre-relational individuals we may recognise instead the multiple ways in which we are all always-already entangled. In the closing of her speech, Pisani made us reflect, in groups, on ideas that may allow one to overcome such borderland-thinking, such as the idea of love.
In the afternoon, we returned to discussing the concrete instances of migration in Lampedusa, with another session which included the Forum Lampedusa Solidale. We tried to apply the notions we elaborated with Maria Pisani and the stories and moments we experienced over the previous days through an artistic visual form – a collage of drawing and objects collected from the complex of the summer school – and especially through the composition of a short lyrical corpus, to be attached to the song Fischia il Vento a Lampedusa (“Blows the wind in Lampedusa”). In small groups, we composed a few lines for this music experiment. While on the surface it appeared to be a light or trivial activity, in fact the act of focussing on the possible verbal expression of the migratory experience was a touching and compelling moment that perhaps approximated the inter-subjective position which we discussed in the morning with Maria Pisani.
Although vested as an occasion for socialisation and amusement, the session and the seventh day at large provided us with a unique chance to test the ordinary ways in which the “us” and “them” are commonly constructed, sometimes unwittingly, and it showed us how a social world that recognises relationality and empathy may look like.
After a full free Sunday of relax, the sixth day of the summer school opened by introducing the theme of the process of patrimonialisation of tangible and intangible heritage, reflecting on how institutional and informal organisations approach the valorisation of heritage. The questions that guided this reflection are: What is heritage? Who decides what is? Who has the right to acquire it?
In the morning Camille Faucourt, curator of the ‘Mobility and Intercultural’ collections at Mucem, Marseille, highlighted the social role of museums: they have informative and educational potential and an institutional task/mandate. Museums have the responsibility to choose what to acquire and what to exhibit. These choices implicate the offer a representation of a community and can contribute to shaping its identity. How to show and transmit this heritage, sometimes sensitive, to the museum's users?
If on the one hand the museum institution acquires ownership of the property and can thus return it to the population, on the other hand this process implies an ethical and political choice that informs an institutional vision on which it is necessary to question ourselves, every choice about what to make visible also implies overshadowing other possible representations. We had the opportunity to identify with the role of curators through the teamwork proposed by the lecturer, who put us in front of the question of what to show and how to insert it into a shared and co-constructed narrative.
If during the morning we were able to deepen the point of view of public museum institutions during the afternoon we were able to deal with projects that emerged from the commitment of civil society and constructed from below, which outside of institutional constraints assume the responsibility to perform the same function.
The first of these subjects is IBBY, an international organization thanks to which has been opened the first library on the island of Lampedusa. IBBY is not simply a space in which to read and borrow books, but a place where children learn how to take care of spaces and objects that are common goods and therefore do not belong to anyone in particular, but to the entire community. In order to overcome the linguistic and cultural barriers between new and old inhabitants of the island, is promoted the use of Silent Books, which avoid any kind of barrier. These books thus become a meeting space through which to travel and share, making children active readers. Unfortunately, the library's desire to be inclusive clashes with the denial of freedom of movement to new arrivals on the island, who are confined to the hotspot, children included.
The day ended in Porto M, where we met Giacomo Sferlazzo and attended his performance. The artist introduced us to the history of the island through different artistic languages able to connect traditional expressive channels, such as puppets and 'u cuntu', with elements of contemporaneity. In addition to this, at PortoM it is possible to visit a room where a collection of objects - small but full of meanings - belonging to migrants who arrived on the island is set up. The work of collecting, restoring and displaying the objects curated by the artist together with the Askavusa collective aims to make visitors aware of the context and of the different ways of remembering the stories of people in search of better living conditions.
We therefore find ourselves reflecting on the ownership of objects, on their narration and on which discourses are constructed from them and in what modalities. What relationship exists between the institutional world and with that of lower-level productions? Which narratives are most capable of restoring objects to their own history?
On the 18th of September, the fourth day of the Summer School MeditHerity - Mobility and Heritage in the Mediterranean started with the lecture of professor Stefano Malatesta. After it, we met Legambiente and Turtle Rescue members, and we found out some interesting points of contact emerging from these confrontations. First of all, the fact that insularity and isolation are not synonymous.
Being on an island at the centre of the South-West, we realised that there are multiple borders and relationships. If politically, Lampedusa island fits Europe, geologically, it is part of the African plate.
The island presents itself as a system that acts as a connection point between different dynamics and flows. A complex system where the interaction between different agents, human and non-human, are in constant relation to each other.
The island-system brings out the close and regular interconnections between people, animals, and the environment in its geographical limitation. Elements of an ecosystem in which limits and opportunities are in the sea, depending on the observer’s perspective.
For this reason, we have perceived it as fundamental to find a balance functional to the coexistence, especially in an island context. In fact Lampedusa receives nourishment from the sea; it bases its current economic system on it; it interacts with the surrounding world through it.
Observing the island’s reality and listening to the stories of the people who live and work on it, we realise that the interpretative tools and theoretical perspectives often risk being too limited to deal with the complexity of the multiple dynamics existing. As social scientists, we are aware of the gap between our theories and the worldview of the locals and how, in everyday life, categories are subject to a permeability that is not immediately identifiable. But, who has the right to be called ‘local’ in Lampedusa? We have met many people who are not natives but are, nevertheless, highly engaged in daily practice dynamics surrounding the island and/or its history.
One of the aspects, and more generally of the language, that particularly struck us was the correlation between the concepts of ‘rescue’ and ‘emergency’ in their multiple meanings. Saving turtles, rescuing migrant people, and preserving the environment appear to be ethically and pragmatically inseparable elements of the island’s single image and attitude.
If, on the one hand, we are shown the importance of taking care of the island because, through its rescue, the ecosystem can be maintained, on the other hand the island itself performs rescue actions towards the outside that can have repercussions on the internal balances.
In a context of limited size, it is also evident that there is a « double-edged » between accessibility and preservation, human dignity (of migrant people and/or workers) and tourist system, economy and environment. How to strike a balance? What are the elements worthy of consideration? Who has the right to set it?
In our opinion, Lampedusa is crossed by multiple contradictions, which have been highlighted by our interlocutors and are intertwined with the main themes of dehumanization and empathy.
In the morning, we experienced how migrant flows and landings have highlighted this division in the local context. Forum Lampedusa Solidale (FLS) and Mediterranean Hope (MH) are the only group of people from the civil society allowed to be at the dock during the landings’ procedures. Paola, one of their members, describes their role at the dock as a political action against the dehumanization of migrant people entering Europe put in place by the institutional system and represented by the local security forces. In particular, Giovanni from Mediterranean Hope mentioned the high level of symbolic and physical violence present at the dock and how they try to negotiate and mediate the interactions with the new-comers. In fact, the Covid-19 emergency has worsened this problem due to the fact that migrant people cannot go out of the Hotspot as they did before, neither officially nor informally. The only place where they’re now able to meet the local population is at the dock just after disembarking. It is also for this reason that MH and FLS feel the need to give them a warm welcome upon arrival making them feel taken care of after their journey.
As Paola pointed out, it is common to define people on the move simply as migrants, denying their past and identity before their departure. Once arrived, they’re in fact mainly seen as a problem for security and considered as numbers. This narrative is contrasted by the practice of Forum Lampedusa Solidale actively trying to collect and share their stories, especially of those who lost their lives. This counter action manifests itself at the local cemetery, where only some migrants are buried and their stories are shared on descriptive signs on their designated graves. Most of them do not even have their name on it, but only their supposed date of death. This shows again the importance of building a memory against the threat of being erased or forgotten.
In the afternoon, we focused on youth mobility in Morocco, as presented to us through the research completed by Nadja Dumann. However, the same dichotomy - as lens to read the flows of unaccompanied minors to Europe – is still suitable taking the shape of the contrastive tendencies of protection and criminalization in relation to young migrants.
Today’s experience has been emotionally charged and a lot of links can be found between the various examples. What we feel is one of the most valuable teaching to take with us and internalize is not only to share the story of Lampedusa, but also to reflect upon it in order to recognize the significance of empathy and apply it in other contexts of dehumanisation and Othering as well as our everyday lives.
On the second day of the second edition of the Summer School "Meditherity: mobility and heritage in the Mediterranean", which takes place in Lampedusa, several vibrant themes emerged; one of the main issues addressed was that of coexistence.
Professor Albera who led the first lesson of the Summer School proposed a reflection on shared sacred spaces as places of connectivity and fragmentation.
The paradigmatic case of Lampedusa was located in the largest area of the Mediterranean, reminding us that "Lampedusa is not alone", thus classifying itself as neither an isolated case nor an exceptional one.
In fact, since the Neolithic Lampedusa has historically been at the center of trade, crossings, exchanges and flows that have determined its current social and ecological configuration.
This complexity is found in the role played by the Sanctuary of the Madonna di Porto Salvo as a place of interreligious coexistence also dictated by the need to adapt to the various historical and social conditions.
This, like many other shared places, not only affects physical space, but also implies the circulation of ideas, concepts, objects, cults and experiences.
The history and myth that accompany the life of Andrea Anfossi - Ligurian sailor kidnapped by the Saracens, escaped their control and later miraculously returned to his native land - gives life to the cult of Our Lady of Lampedusa; it does not only imply a process of migration of the individual but also of the cult related to him.
Andrea Anfossi's experience exemplifies the past and recent history of the island characterized by various forms of circulation and migration (human, faunal, plants) that deny the rhetoric of exceptionality and of Lampedusa as a remote, desert and archaic place.
The Historical Archive of Lampedusa that we were able to visit with the guide of the co-founder Fabio Giovanetti is a precious and significant testimony of this.
Lampedusa is often narrated through the rhetoric of the emergency of migrants and also as a deserted and isolated place, even if in reality these descriptions are partial.
On the contrary, the island is configured as an animated, populated and vibrant place, stratified by multiple stories of ancient and contemporary populations that have given life to this synergy.
This complexity is also found in the richness of the ecological heritage of the island ecosystem which is continuously regenerated.
The Mediterranean goes beyond the confines of simple physical fact. Can we view the Med as an imagined space? And what role will perception play in many of the arguments that will be presented throughout the summer school? What is the Mediterranean to most of us: is it home, is it the home we are running away from or the home we are longing to return to? Is it a place we leave to transform ourselves and come back to as renewed bodies, via pilgrimage, tourism or migration? (Nadja Dumann, Stefano Malatesta and Diogini Albera will discuss these matters in detail). Ultimately, how do we ascribe meaning to the world around us?
The meaning that individuals and groups give to space and place provides an interesting dynamic. Studying these spaces allows us to gain insight into the different people’s world views and the sharing of spaces (or not!) leads to the creation of communities, many of which are also transient and at times in conflict (Maria Pisani and Dionigi Albera will speak about this and some of the activists too from the perspective of environment, tourism and migration).
The sea has provided ample opportunities for trade by legal or illegal means, throughout history. Corsairs, pirates, and many traders have used the sea currents and central Mediterranean islands like Lampedusa, Malta, Sicily and Sardegna as safe harbours connecting the western to the eastern Mediterranean as well as north Africa to Europe…..a special axis that will most likely dominate much of our discussions here this week. In the words of David Abulafia (2011):
“Mediterranean history can mean many things. (T)his book is a history of the Mediterranean Sea, rather than a history of the lands around it; more particularly, it is a history of the people who crossed the sea and lived close by to its shores in ports and on islands. My theme is the process by which the Mediterranean became in varying degrees integrated into a single commercial, cultural and even (under the Romans) political zone, and how these periods of integration ended with sometimes violent disintegration, whether through warfare or plague”.
These words are timeless, and could well apply to our contemporary reality.
Looking towards tourism will combine many of the abovementioned strands to provide a context to discuss the socio-economic and socio-environmental impact of such movement of people and goods on local and environmental realities. Local(ised) consumption of the tourism product is leaving its mark on more sensitive ecologies (including human ecologies). The material culture we carry with us and leave behind, speaks of the stories of things-changing-hands. Of routes and journeys, of meaning and of emotion where value is ascribed to things and things are used to transact and build connections and relations via reciprocal exchange. This aspect of material culture and the transience it embodies is also of interest to Camille Faucourt’s session. Many of these strands will flow through the research that will be presented in Giovanna Di Matteo’s session discussing the research presented by our doctoral researchers here.
(Except from Rachel Radmillli's Introduction to the summer school, Lampedusa, 15th September 2021)
