A corpo scomparso L’epifania dell’oggetto di naufragio migratorio tra metamorfosi estetiche e performative

Abstract

This article examines the epiphany of the migrant shipwreck object as a surrogate for disappeared bodies within the Mediterranean migration regime. Starting from the 2013 Lampedusa tragedy and focusing on the case of the Augusta wreck—later exhibited as Barca Nostra at the 2019 Venice Biennale—the study analyses how debris such as boats and life jackets undergo aesthetic, ritual, political, and commercial metamorphoses. Drawing on Performance Studies, anthropology, semiotics, and critical border theory, the essay investigates the ambiguous status of these objects oscillating between waste and relic, testimony and spectacle, activism and commodification. Through case studies ranging from Christoph Büchel’s installation to Ai Weiwei’s monumental life-jacket works and ritual reuses of wreck wood, the article argues that migrant objects acquire relational performativity while simultaneously risking aestheticization and semantic depletion. Ultimately, the proliferation of these objects within European cultural spaces exposes a necropolitical asymmetry: objects are preserved, monumentalized, and circulated, while migrant bodies remain unrecognized, unidentified, and politically marginalized.