© Max Hirzel
Italy/Senegal 2015/2017.
"In the desert I saw a grave, it was of a girl of Douala, and I wondered if her parents, her brothers and sisters knew that their baby was there“. I met Alpha in Bamako, in 2011. The idea to work on the management of migrant deceased bodies originated that day, with his words. I began from the cemeteries, I wanted to understand where and how those bodies are buried, how many are identified and how many not. I noticed many similarities between the reception of migrant people survivors and the management of migrant's corpses: codes, lines, numbers, suits, masks. In both cases, the individual histories bring us to the person. These bodies, as quantity and age of the victims, represent an anomaly, a huge aberration that can be mistaken for fatality. I wanted to show this anomaly. One corpse, one person. A number instead of the name. I was getting closer to the heart of the matter, the identification. In one side of the Mediterranean sea there are people working for returning a name to a body. In the other one the missing families that without that body cannot celebrate the mourning. I met many stories, as those of Angelo Milazzo, policeman of Syracuse Attorney, and Mohamed Matok, Syrian lawyer, that leaved Damascus especially to visit the grave of his brother, identified by Angelo. Then the story of the so-called “boat of innocents” - which sank on April 18th 2015, with the loss of more than 700 lives – that intersects with the work of Cristina Cattaneo, director of Labanof, Forensic Anthropology Laboratory of Milan University, and its staff and that of the young autopsy technicians of the Palermo Policlinic. Finally, in south Senegal, I met the family of Mamadou, missing for two years, he's an alleged victim of this same shipwreck of April 18th 2015. So this has become the story of all of them, as well as of the responsibility of us, Europeans
Italie/Sénégal, 2015/2017.
L'idée de travailler sur la gestion des corps des migrantes décédés naît en 2011, quand au Mali un jeune migrant me raconta: "Dans le désert j'ai vu une tombe, c'était d'une fille de Douala, et je me suis posé la question si ses parents savaient que leur enfant était là". J'ai commencé par les cimetières, je voulais comprendre où ces personnes sont enterrés et comment, combien avec un nom ou quoi, à la place. Ces corps, pour quantité et âge des victimes, représentent une anomalie, une géante aberration qu'on s'habitue à échanger pour fatalité. Je voulais montrer l'anomalie. J'ai vu des similitudes entre accueil des vifs et gestion des morts: codes, lignes, numéros, combinaisons, masques. Dans les deux cas, les histoires individuelles nous reportent à la personne. D'un côté de la Méditerranée il y a des gens qu'ils s'efforcent de restituer un nom à un corps. De l'autre, initialement seulement imaginées car ne pas encore accessibles à moi, les familles des disparus qui ne peuvent pas célébrer le deuil sans ce corps. Les uns savent peu ou rien des autres, la rencontre entre les deux côtés est le cercle qui parfois se ferme. Celle-ci est ainsi devenue l'histoire d'eux tous.
