Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani

Christina Werner
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Freedom of Movement - A Momentary Flight

What happened leaves traces, some of which are quite concrete—buildings, dead bodies, censuses, monuments, diaries, political boundaries – that limit the range and significance of any historical narrative. This is one of many reasons why not any fiction can pass for history: the materiality of the sociohistorical process (…) sets the stage for future historical narratives (…). *1

“I replay, I replay, I replay the footage of Abebe Bikila,” a monotone verse repeated by the male narrator off-screen establishes a rhythm that seems to track the bare soles of a lonely runner on night-soaked streets. Through the course of montaged archival footage, layers of projected imagery and night shots in the streets of Rome, the rhythm guides us on an open-ended narrative that aims to carve through collective memory, both filmically and literally, into our historical consciousness.

Entering the exhibition space, the first screen of the multi-channel video installation “Freedom of Movement” sets a historical backdrop: the 1960 Olympics Games in Rome when Ethiopian Abebe Bikila became the first black African athlete to win an Olympic gold medal, achieving a new world record while running barefoot. We see his feet gently pat the ground, gliding past architecture and monuments loaded with the weight of colonial history.

In an exercise of re-enactment, the film’s protagonist traces the route of the 1960 marathon at night. The footage of Abebe Bikila’s triumphant victory is projected onto his tricot bearing Bikila’s bib number ‘11’ and the original route’s historic sites: the race starts on one of Rome’s seven hills at the Piazza di Campidoglio, follows along an angular loop to the Appian Way of ancient Rome, continues through the Piazza Venezia, passes along the Obelisk on Porta Capena square and finishes under the Arch of Constantine. The marathon starts in the late afternoon and finishes after dark, the course lit by torches to illuminate the route, lined by a cheering crowd.

Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani blend images from past and present while tracing the interwoven stories built from stone and ingrained into the urban fabric. Following Bikila, the moving images pan across the Piazza Venezia. It is here, from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia, that Mussolini announced the declaration of war against Ethiopia and its occupation in 1936. Black and white newsreel footage shows the 24-meter-tall granite stele of the fourth-century Obelisk of Axum before it was looted by Mussolini and shipped to Rome to stand at Porta Capena Square in front of the Ministry of Italian Africa, announcing the conquest of Ethiopia and an attempt to establish a "new Roman Empire". The archival projection transitions back to color film footage from a bird’s-eye view of the same setting as Bikila passes the Obelisk during daytime.

Bikila crosses the impartial stone monolith for a second time in the course after nightfall with exactly two kilometers left in the race and breaks into his final sprint towards the world record.

Bikila’s triumph embodied the new spirit of Africa that had enthralled the continent and reflected a cross-cultural confidence that grew with the development of African independence and Pan-African awareness. The visuals of Bikila’s momentary flight generate a strong sense of nostalgia for a period promising change, progress and freedom for the whole of Africa as it stood at the brink of a hopeful and glorious new future. A taste of nostalgia that turned stale for many vanished into thin air for others. Bikila returned home as a conquering hero a quarter-century after Ethiopia defeated the Italian invasion, but a further opaque image shimmers through: another victorious Ethiopian marathon runner, Feyisa Lilesa, reaches the finish line at the recent Rio Olympics. With wrists crossed above his head, he crosses a politically acceptable line of protest in his home country, and anticipating the consequences of media exposure, does not return after all.

Reaffirming Lenin, Mussolini said ‘the cinema is the most powerful weapon.’ The projected footage repurposes archival material from the Fascist regime documenting the construction of EUR - Esposizione Universale Roma, site of the 1942 World Fair and a symbolic celebration of twenty years of Fascism. The materials made available by the Instituto Luce, Cinecittà show the towering white travertine buildings and strict grid of streets of EUR, characteristic Fascist architecture in its urgency of representation and design intent to control the masses. EUR was not only an attempt to reinvent the Roman Empire but also the model city and master plan for a new Addis Ababa, the colonial capital of the Italian imperial expansion into East Africa. EUR brought together Italy’s past and future in a re-historicized space and was one of the most controversial venues of the Olympics.

The sequence of scenes elucidates and obscures meanings, variously shining light and casting shadows on regimes of power to warp historical narratives. The images and bodies in movement flash past the Foro Italico and the Colosseo Quadrato, rendering glimmers of a history that fade again into oblivion. In re-writing, re-sculpting, and re-defining history, the film above all invites the viewer to consider the malleability of meaning assigned to architectural sites and monuments. Footage of the Obelisk of Axum follows its globally intertwined trajectories in a history-traversing relay spanning the Italian invasion to the Obelisk’s restitution to Ethiopia in 2008. Its ornamented surface with two false doors at the base and blind windows on all sides are emulated in the artificial and superimposed loggias of the Colosseo Quadrato, considered one of the most representative examples of Fascist architecture. In presence and absence, the Obelisk leaves traces in both public space and collective memory.

The Colosseo Quadrato is the starting point for another journey presented at the far end of the gallery space where two adjacent screens engage in a visual dialogue. The right screen presents the Colosseo Quadrato, also known as Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, in its imposing dominance. A chorus of teenagers from diverse African countries approach, climb the stairs and start to improvise cheers. Reaching the rooftop, their recitations shift to reinterpret the inscription on all four sides of the building from a speech by Mussolini implicitly promoting colonial expansion on the African Continent:

Un popolo di poeti, di artisti, di eroi, di santi, di pensatori, di scienziati, di navigatori, di trasmigratori.

Altering the text to reflect their own status, they chant:

We come from nations of poets, of artists, of heroes, of saints, of scientists, navigators and migrants.

Their voices eclipse the inscribed ambitions of fascist Europe to redefine what migration means and challenge the distinction made between refugee/migrant versus citizen: a distinction based on a deceptive historical logic implicit in our language that continues to separate states from (former) colonies. They invoke in spirit the principle of ‘unity in diversity’, an ideal with burgeoning resonance contemporary to Bikila’s momentary flight, exhorting common goals for coming generations. Rejecting the limiting constructs of race, nationality and citizenship, the polyphony of their song, voices and languages celebrates the diversity of our societies and reminds us that only a deep acceptance of this threatened plurality will allow our communities to prosper.

With the chorus chanting, the camera pans down from the rooftop of the Colosseo Quadrato to street level, turning left and right. The perspective shifts to inhabit the first-person view of the marathon runner suddenly criss-crossing an endless virtual maze of an uninhabited, haunted imaginary of the fascist city grid composed of an endless repetition of the Colosseo Quadrato’s facade. The computerized and uncanny desolation of the cityscape turns Mussolini’s “La Terza Roma”, planned to span from the Rome’s hills to the seaside, into an artificial nightmare.

Rhythmic breathing soundtracks our experience of the game’s virtual reality and eventually syncs with the breath of the runner shown in the third screen. Here, the protagonist again wears Bikila’s “11” on his tricot as he starts his journey in the shallows at Ostia. From there, he traces a different route along Via Appia Antica, connecting EUR and Foro Italico to arrive at the district of Pietralata and the empty athletic fields of Liberi Nantes. The camera exposes specific historical junctures along his course. He passes the mosaics of athletes at the Foro Italico, which also appeared in the archival footage from the first screen, documenting the iconographic heritage of the Mussolini era in its making. Abebe Bikila crossed the finish line at the Arch of Constantine in front of an exultant crowd but the present barefoot runner arrives finally in the empty and quiet outskirts. Weary from traversing the urban landscapes, he reaches the dusty ground unnoticed. A football squad consisting of players from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Guinea, Iraq, Nigeria, Sudan, Togo, Democratic Republic of Congo drifts by. Like the members of the teen chorus, all have arrived in Italy seeking refuge, crossing the Mediterranean in search of somewhere to start afresh. The name of the club, “Liberi Nantes”, derives from a verse from Virgil’s Aeneid referencing the few exiled and shipwrecked Trojans that washed ashore and survived: a metaphor for an unwavering culture of resilience. With metallic gold and silver glister, a swish of space blankets carried like sports flags rush by the protagonist. His eyes seem to fix towards the distance, turn toward the camera and meet the viewers’ gaze.

I play, I replay, I relay those stories and histories encountered from a certain distance: from seats in the cinema, bleachers in the stadium, the stage, the street, the shore, from behind the camera and from revisiting the archive. Revisiting the past from a distance, re-enacting it and throwing it onto the present render visible our shared histories and sociologies. Those diverse perspectives layered and choreographed by the artists shed light onto the constant challenges of our ongoing, ordinary interrelatedness. Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani take us on a filmic journey, that subtly poses fundamental questions: Observing the present from a distance, will we recall it for its omissions and failures; for our inability to transcend differences and prejudices; and for disappointments and disillusionments that follow in its trail? Or do we choose and encourage to pre-enact what is latent and opaque but there: a collective responsibility to lightly pencil in, with intention, patience and care, potentialities for more inclusive trajectories?

*1 Michel-Rolph Trouillot: Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Beacon Press, 1995.

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Léa Battais
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Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani
Freedom of Movement

Rue d'Alger
Istituto Italiano di Cultura - Marseille
Manifesta 13 Marseille - Les Paralléles du Sud, 2020

Artistes polymorphes, Fischer & el Sani utilisent la photographie, la sculpture ou le film pour mener une recherche sur les éléments architecturaux qui portent les traces des bouleversements sociaux, historiques et écologiques. Entre fiction et documentaire, l’univers créé par les deux artistes vise à interroger les mémoires et les identités des sociétés contemporaines dans un cheminement complexe entre les espaces et les temps. À travers le langage symbolique et fonctionnel de l’architecture, parfois abandonnée et oubliée (Spelling Dystopia, film tourné en 2008 sur l’île désaffectée de Hashirama au Japon) ou parfois fortement connoté politiquement (comme le quartier EUR érigé à Rome par Mussolini filmé dans Freedom of Movement, 2017-2018), les expériences personnelles et sensibles rencontrent les grands moments de l’histoire. Immémorés, grandioses ou controversés, ces espaces historiques questionnent notre actualité : colonisation, émigration, identité, épuisement des ressources, futur de l’humanité…

Dans le cadre de Rue d’Alger, Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani proposent une version in situ de l’installation Freedom of Movement, qui interroge les notions de passé colonial, d’identité et de transmigration.

Présentée sous la forme d’un triptyque qui rythme la longue salle du dopolavoro dans l’ancienne Casa d’Italia de Marseille, les vidéos nous offrent en simultané des contrastes saisissant de couleurs et de sons. Les réflexions des deux artistes s’établissent dès la première vidéo, sur la base d’archives des années 1930 et 1960. Une voix tonitruante italienne des archives Luce y introduit la construction du quartier fasciste d’EUR à Rome, dont l’architecture et le plan devait servir pour transformer la capitale éthiopienne Abbis Abeba en symbole de la colonisation italienne fasciste. Cette présentation est suivie d’images de la course mythique d’Abebe Bikila, vainqueur du marathon des Jeux Olympiques de Rome en 1960. Ethiopien, Bikila fut le premier athlète noir à monter sur la première marche du podium olympique. Son évolution déterminée et gracieuse dans les vestiges de ce que fut la capitale de l’Empire romain, Empire qu’ambitionnait le Duce, nous fait remonter l’histoire et symbolise une ère nouvelle, celle d’une émancipation des anciens pays colonisés.

Construite en miroir à cette course, la deuxième vidéo présente un coureur immigré, partant de la plage d’Ostia et poursuivant jusqu’au centre-ville de Rome, où il rejoint le tracée qui fut celui de Bikila. Passant lui aussi parmi les vestiges romains et la Via Appia, il termine son parcours sur un terrain de sport où il sera rejoint par d’autres jeunes africains dans un ballet métallique de couvertures de survies. Cet objet, présent dans l’écume de la plage au moment de l’arrivée du coureur, nous renvoie à la question des émigrés qui tentent la dangereuse traversée de la Méditerranée. 
 
La dernière vidéo se fait l’écho architectural de la première, en nous immergeant dans un EUR fantomatique, où les arches du Palais de la Civilisation Italienne se reflètent dans un dédale sans fin. Puis l’image se fait plus claires et colorées et nous suivons l’ascension d’une chorale de jeunes africains, reprenant la devise mussolinienne dont le Colisée Carré se fait l’écrin : « Un peuple de poètes, d’artistes, de héros, de saints, de penseurs, de scientifiques, de navigateurs, de migrants ». La liberté de mouvement qui fut celle de l’Italie fasciste dans ses ambitions colonisatrices n’est pas reflétée par la situation actuelle des migrants, dont certains sont issus des mêmes pays qui autrefois composèrent un empire colonial. Chantée par des jeunes artistes, qui décident de répéter cette devise en se l’appropriant et en s’y incluant, un double sens transparaît. La maxime gravée à leurs pieds est retournée contre un pays dont la politique migratoire stricte ne facilite pas l’arrivée de ces nouveaux navigateurs de la Méditerranée. Mais au-delà de ce discours politique, la réappropriation de ces mots, nous offre l’occasion de réfléchir sur la notion floue d’identité qui ne s’arrête pas aux frontières géopolitiques. Il s’agit alors d’accepter et d’inclure l’autre et le différent.

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Francesco Ventrella
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Structures of Empathy:
Moving and Being Moved in the Black Mediterranean

Arab Studies Journal, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA.
Spring 2023

Structures of Empathy:
Moving and Being Moved in the Black Mediterranean
Francesco Ventrella (University of Sussex)

1. Traffic of Feelings
In recent years, “the spectacle of the shipwreck”1 has seemingly become associated with an outpouring of emotions in the public arena of both mass media and political discourse around the Black Mediterranean, the notion, inspired by Paul Gilroy’s account of the Black Atlantic, to challenge the romance of the ‘middle sea’ as a crucible of convivial exchange and culturalcrossings, and to capture, instead, the long history of both racial subordination and resistance in the region.2 Appeals to show empathy in response to the tragic toll paid by migrants and refugees trying to cross the sea, often reproduce the asymmetrical distance elicited by images of maritime agony – between here and there, our shores and their sea.3 While empathy is assumed as the capacity to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, the traffic of feelings in the Black Mediterranean suggests, instead, that empathy can also be intertwined with a process of othering. Indeed, while emotions may be the expression of a genuine desire to restore a sense of humanity vis-a-vis the tragic representation of overstuffed and unseaworthy vessels, they can also displace the point of view of the living migrants, and supplant the memorization of the dead ones.
The question of whether visual culture can increase empathy to move consciousnesses has a long genealogy in art history and criticism, especially with regard to the evaluation of humanism in photography championed during the last century by the likes of Susan Sontag and John Berger. Recent commentaries on emotionalism and empathetic projection indicate the necessity to challenge to the geometry of emotions that maintains the separation between ‘we’ and ‘others’ upholding the double bind between identity and identification. So art historian Jill Bennett examines empathy as a problematic process when another’s experience becomes “assimilated to the self in the most simplistic and sentimental way; anything the audience’s immediate experience remains beyond comprehension”.4 Important for her is the distinction between the spectacle of feeling, in which art produces a didactic message about empathy, and the creation of affective intensities that flow across and through bodies. This distinction of embodiment is essential to gauge the difference between feeling into, and simply being moved by the condition of another. As Bennett aptly concludes, art cannot give audiences just answers: “[i]t needs, in a sense, to relinquish the moral position in order to enable an ethical inquiry”.5
Conjuring up empathy might seem remote from the pragmatics of migration and the brutality of border control. Many continue to stress the social function of empathy in galvanizing collective responses across a variety of scenarios, where questions of geo-political relations and social justice are at stake, in opposition to the impassibility and indifference of national organizations before human tragedy.6 However, its appeal to establish an imaginary relation to another may suggest an apolitical and ahistorical relation which some critics have dismissed for romanticizing suffering. On the contrary, in this essay I propose to return to empathy’s multilayered meanings, in order to interrogate how emotional responses are structurally intertwined with historical consciousness, and how the process of empathy can help us analyse the aesthetic politically.
Here I am particularly interested in empathy’s connotation through embodiment, as “a body that impresses its form in space”.7 Indeed, this essay is informed by the proposition that empathy’s attempt at decoding the body affectively shapes its function as a historical portal between past and present with material, rather than solely imaginary implications. Simultaneously cognitive and affective, empathy refers both to a heuristic concept and an embodied capacity whereby mimicry and simulation connect movement with being moved.8
Originating in late-eighteenth-century moral philosophy, but transformed within the interdisciplinary fields of psychological aesthetics and art history during the long nineteenthcentury, in its acceptation as Einfühlung (literally ‘feeling into’) from German aesthetics, empathy named the possibility to be impressed by an external body, animate or inanimate.9 For its capacity to create a bind in its connection to, and projection into an ‘other’, empathy proved fundamental to the modern understanding of spectatorship, along with other emotions associated with modernity, such as distraction and estrangement. Thus art historian Juliet Koss points out that, in the era of modern totalitarianisms, empathy became epitomised with a shallow and passive form of spectatorship, one which may inhibit, rather than prompt, moral action, critical awareness and political engagement.10 But empathy, as a form of tactical mimicry famously discussed by literary theorist Homi Bhabha as the “encounter between white presence and its black semblance”, also formed a fundamental aspect in the post-colonial inversion of racializing master narratives and colonial textualities that fix the subject onto essentialist topographies of time and place.11 Finally, the question of whether empathetic projection can help us attain an understanding of another or merely reiterates ourselves12 points to the problematic interconnectedness between empathy and identity, which Frantz Fanon already recognised in the special bind between empathy and ‘race’.13 Thus, Fanon suggested that empathy can be a useful process to explore both how emotions participate in the cultural processes of racialisation, and how artistic practices can reinforce or remediate the nexus of race and emotions as it plays out within hegemonic narratives of migration. Interrogating empathy is therefore essential to historically problematise European responses to the refugee ‘crisis’ in the Mediterranean and, in Fanon’s sense, the “politics of recognition and solidarity with communities beyond one’s own immediate experience”. 14
With reference to Fanon, the sociologist Paul Gilroy has criticized the assumed othering operated by such traffic of feelings and has appealed to the need for sympathy to bear “upon the prospect of encountering humanity outside or beyond its racial configurations”.15 Cultural theorist Carolyn Pedwell, instead, has explained that the problematic extraction and
commodification of feelings in late liberal economies means that empathy is not always a catalyst for social justice, but can become intertwined with governamentality, of which ‘race’ becomes one, among other, expressions of power.16 Along this line inquiry, literary scholar Marcus Wood examined how the attempts to empathise with the lived experience of the slave, disseminated by British literature around the time of the Abolition Act of 1807, produced not only an appropriation, but an aestheticization of the suffering of others, by means of which the abolitionist may become a kind of affective vampire, channelling pleasurable feeling, or even sexual titillation, from the tormented body of the slave.17
These critical positions introduce the predicament of empathy which I wish to expand with reference to art and visual culture in the context of migration and refugee studies. My aim is to deessentialise the notional whiteness of the spectator of art engaged with migration, and indicate where an artwork can take us, what emotional responses it propels us into, and how these responses are historically conditioned by constructions of ‘race’. By working with an interdisciplinary agenda that includes social and political theory, international relations, migration studies, and cultural geographies, this essay does not posit art as transcending sociopolitical barriers, but as a critical reorganization of the humanitarian assumptions surrounding the role of the aesthetic in promoting consciousness of political equity and social justice.

2. ‘Empty Empathy’
E. Ann Kaplan’s concept of ‘empty empathy’, which she develops at the intersection of trauma studies and visual culture, elucidates a form of notional empathy where motivation for social action is opaque, but also where transitory empathetic feelings are impoverished through exposure to successive images of pain, which thus become translated into a kind of bland
sentimentality. 18The serial proliferation of images of catastrophe at sea, suffering and mass displacement, fuelled by the age of camera-phones sustained by the extraction of African minerals, is evidently implicated in the hollowing of our capacity for empathy. As political theorist Gabi Schlag explains, “images depicting moments of distress and misery can be both, powerful in the sense that they raise awareness and provoke emotional responses, and powerless in the sense that they de-politicize the suffering of others”.19 Take the viral dissemination in 2015 of a photograph of the Syrian-Kurdish toddler Alan Kurdi, found lifeless and face down on the shores near the tourist town of Bodrum, Turkey.
The image famously sparked public displays of emotions culminating in the #humanitywashedashore, but also some criticism about the way in which the orchestration of emotions and the scripting of affect are now intrinsic to the moulding of popular opinion online. Unlike other images that have become associated with the visual culture of refugees in the Mediterranean, Kurdi’s photograph instigated an unprecedented response from politicians and on social media, as well as a flurry of academic enquiries, from visual and media theory to quantitative digital analysis, but also migration studies, political theory and international relations. The fact that an image has become such a multidisciplinary object of analysis illuminates the power of photography in driving conversations that revolve around emotions attached to borders that transgress discursive borders. As a group of international relations scholars point out, the “epistemic significance of ‘Kurdi’ is not derived from its ability to document the ‘refugee crisis’, but from making the ramifications of the crisis felt at a human, personal, and visceral level”.20
A few months after the event, contemporary artist and political dissident Ai Weiwei posed as Alan Kurdi on the beach of Lesbos, where he, also declared a refugee, relocated to “raise awareness about the plight of refugees”, in a photograph by Rohit Chawla first published on India Today.21 This artistic intervention literalises the embodied limits of empathy discussed above, as the artist’s response to the tragedy of the dead toddler is transformed into passive imitation. According to art historian Jordan Amirkhani, by harnessing a viewer’s attention and emotional investment in the image through pity, he bypasses any contextual elements of the causes or explanations for Kurdi’s death, and mobilizes the image to represent the entirety of the Syrian humanitarian crisis. In doing so, Weiwei turns the spotlight toward himself rather than prioritizing and creating space for the suffering to speak for themselves.22
Not only the spreading of the artist’s image as Kurdi reinforced the remits of the culture of spectatorship which, according to Susan Sontag’s famous formulation, uses pain to titillate the viewer so long as it keeps it at a safe distance, but also it deploys empathy through passive imitation, altruism through narcissistic mirroring. Such understanding of empathy is complicit with the totalizing nature of the language of crisis as a ‘state of exception’, rather than as a historical project intertwined with the very political constitution of Europe and its borders.23 While empathy, by definition, is the affect that mediates a form of emotional resonance with what is not me, it also creates the affective preconditions to reinforce the self that claims to occupy the position of the other.
Cultural geographer Chiara Giubilaro has written that it was because the child looked like ‘our children’ that his image could become the catalyser of a discursive reiteration of whiteness. One of the effects of this merging of images and emotions on social media in 2015 was its implication with European governamentality; shifting the attention away from the historical and political conditions that have created the ‘crisis’ of refugees fleeing from Assad’s regime in Syria, and towards displays of emotions in which a ‘we’ becomes identifiable from the common sharing of similar feelings towards humanity at risk. As a propellor of national and supranational feelings,empathy can be used to buttress European identity, rather than to understand the
contextual conditions that force thousands of nameless and voiceless people to escape omnipresent violence and attain asylum.
Political theorist Ida Danewid has cited contemporary art arising from the so-called ‘summer of migration’ in 2015 as evidence for the inadequate politics of continual appeals to feelings with the shipwrecked and the dead in the Mediterranean that perpetuate the image of Europe’s ‘white innocence’. Another work by Ai Weiwei, the orange life jacket installation Soleil Levant (2017) in Berlin, but also Christoph Büchel’s Barca Nostra (2019), the wreckage of a fishing boat that carried hundred of migrants rescued from the sea and transported to the Venice Biennale, the mass burial staged in Berlin by the Center for Political Beauty (2017), or Jason de Caires Taylor’s underwater monument The Raft of Lampedusa (2016) near Lanzarote, represent only a few, among a larger catalogue of art projects, that underwrite mourning, outrage and empathy to move public consciousness towards humanity. Danewid argues that by “focusing on abstract – as opposed to historical – humanity, these discourses contribute to an ideological formation that disconnects connected histories and turns questions of responsibility, guilt, restitution, repentance, and structural reform into matters of empathy, generosity, and hospitality”.24
Moving away from the representation of humanity as ontologically entwined with the vulnerability common to both host and migrant, Danewid makes an important contribution to the examination of the capacity of emotional responses to act as smokescreens for white innocence. But rather than dismissing such manifestations of sentimentality as ahistorical, here I wish to expand on Danewid’s claim to argue that feelings move and are moved by powers that are historically rooted. In Sara Ahmed’s terms, emotions are not simply expressive of inner states, but they represent a material rhetoric through which bodies, by means of becoming accustomed to certain habitual responses, produce social relations, create a sense of belonging, or define shared spaces which have the power to fix or transform our modes of life.25 What role does empathy play in this historical habituation? How can empathy dislodge the crystallization of certain historical feelings?
In order to reorganize the means by which we perceive the appropriateness, or not, of certain emotions in relation to certain historical contexts, I will now turn to the video installation Freedom of Movement (2017) by Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani, which will help me unpack and challenge the structures of empathy upholding Eurocentric fantasies of benevolence towards the figure of the racialized migrant and the refugee. In addressing the realities of migration and the conditions of living the present “in the wake”26 of colonial and imperialist histories that have constructed hierarchies of rights for the living, Freedom of Movement deserts the didactic model proffered by Ai Weiwei’s channeling of empathy to teach the spectator how to feel about the victim and illuminates, instead, the continuities between empathy and bodily resonance through history.

3. Historical Resonances
At a first glance, Freedom of Movement may not appear concerned with emotions, but its visual and narrative structure creates spaces in which empathy is understood as bodily resonance and mimicry through history. Featuring the collaboration with the amateur, non-profit sport association Liberi Nantes, and the Choir of the Emmaus School in Maenza, the three-channel video installation produced by artists duo Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani responded to a commission from MAXXI Museum in Rome to address issues of hospitality and the continuing histories of African-diasporic people in the city. The work includes original footage of Ethiopian marathon runner Abebe Bikila, who famously run barefoot under the Arch of Constantine to win the first African gold medal at the Olympic Games of Rome 1960. The three screens also show old newsreels from the Fascist era, ranging from the construction of EUR, the site of the 1942 World Fair that never took place due the war, to an eerie VR recreation of the neoclassical buildings of that district, while an off-screen script, written following a cut-up technique of interviews and archival texts.
Images of the sea represent an involute signifier within Freedom of Movement, one which is patently interconnected with the recent history of the Mediterranean. Since the end of the Italian-led operation Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) in 2014, the Mediterranean has been proclaimed as a “stage”27 of global migration, the “spectacularized theatre”28 of what is commonly referred to as an “ongoing crisis”.29 In 2015, the UNHCR solemnly announced that “Europe is living through a maritime refugee crisis”,30 presenting a “new defining challenge” to the European continent; a position which openly voices the securitized concerns about the region, rather than the point of view of those coactively displaced.31 Inherently understood as a “problem”, the Mediterranean sea has been interpreted as a border and a space of death,32 a “necropolitical zone of exception”,33 a new legal black hole and a “new space of governmentality”34, a new “humanitarian space”35, which could be filled with new laws, ethics, and feelings.36
As the camera closes up on the shore, the weaves can be seen to carry an emergency foil blanket, one of those used to trap the body heat of migrants saved from the sea, but also of runners after a marathon. Shorelines signify arrival but also departure; a shoreline is more than a line that separates two spaces. Neither here nor there, the shoreline is a space of liminality constantly changing, though it is often patrolled like a static border. The peaceful appearance of the shoreline, filmed just outside Rome, challenges any simple understanding of present-day freedom of movement in the Black Mediterranean, which Fischer and el Sani complicate by juxtaposing archival footage to address questions of citizenship, migration, and identity.
Spanning both colonial histories and postcolonial experiences of diaspora and migration, the notion of the Black Mediterranean prompts a paradigm shift in our understanding of the visual and artistic practices that address this expanse of water not so much as a geographical space to cruise, but as a historical condition of diaspora and an agent of territorialization designed over time by the impact of colonial rule, Eurocentric international relations, and capitalist expansion. This notion is particularly useful to disentangle the optics of the refugee ‘crisis’, by which it has become visualized today according to either a territorialist frame about protecting the borders from invasion, or a humanitarianist one resorting to law of the seas as well as universal human rights.37 According to the Black Mediterranean Collective, a transnational research group formed in response to the events of 2015 and the global Black Lives Matter movement, these two diametrically opposed ideological positions share a similar whitening gaze: “[b]y reproducing basically voiceless subjects that are both talked about and talked for, this gaze simultaneously reproduces the conditions of the very exclusion from the dominant framings of human rights, political asylum and territorial citizenship discourse”.38 The Collective aim to expose the Eurocentric narrative of the ‘middle sea’ by addressing a resonance with the ‘Middle Passage’, in order to make legible the epistemological patterns that reproduce a representation of the black migrant and refugee as either a threat or a victim.
In continuation with their engagement with transitory spaces and collective memory that interrogate the rise and fall of modernity, I am interested in the way in which Fischer and el Sani’s video installation intervenes in our contemporary understanding of the Black Mediterranean to dismantle the whitening gaze upon the history of this space, starting from their handling of the footage of Bikila’s marathon in 1960.
The competition unraveled along via dell’Impero, the street that the Fascist regime had built thirty years earlier to serve as a virtual connection between the ancient monuments in the Forum, the exhibition district of EUR and the port town of Ostia on the shores of the Mediterranean.
Another newsreel from the Luce film archive documents the transportation and erection of the obelisk looted in 1935 by the Fascist troops from Axum, Ethiopia. Legend wants that Bikila’s final sprint started after he saw the Axum obelisk at Porta Capena, only a few hundred meters from the end of the marathon under the Arch of Constantine.39 “While Bikila’s race was not a protest per se”, continues the voice over, „to see him running along the ancient Roman road, with its monuments and its spoils of war, offers us a beautiful contrast to imperial obsessions with preservation and greatness. Compared to Rome’s architectural manifestations of conquest, and the industrialisation of Fascism, the act of one man running barefoot becomes for me an opportunity to contemplate the value of generosity, of the ephemeral. The beauty of sports, stripped down to its most fundamental layer.“40
On one screen we can watch the final stages of the competition, taking place near the ancient monuments which become a backdrop to both old empires and the raise of modern post-colonial African nations. Bikila’s determined and elegant gait in the footage, art critic Léa Battais writes, develops “from the vestiges of the former capital of the Roman empire, empire that the Duce aspired to, takes us back in history and symbolizes a new era, that of the emancipation of the former colonized countries”.41 But beyond a mere narrative of African emancipation, Bikila’s run also brings to mind Fred Moten’s definition of Afro-diasporic Blackness as a ‘fugitive’ inflection of the self, a sustained refusal of standards and histories defined elsewhere by
others.42 In this sense, Bikila’s victory could be considered also as a form of aesthetic revenge on colonial history.
As a complex and multilayered archive of historic and contemporary footage, Freedom of Movement is narrated from the point of view of a modern runner who can be hard as repeating the sentence: ‘I replay, I replay, I replay the footage of Abebe Bikila’. Like Isaac Julien’s cantata “Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate” in The Attendat (1993), excerpted from Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas (1689), the utterance ‘I replay’ points to the possibility of the film reel to be played and replayed, an act of care in the archive which functions like a measure of the illegibility of Black presence within colonial history. It is tempting to expand the Virgilian and historical references that unite three continents around the same sea. Significantly, the name of the Liberi Nantes association too, to which the runner belongs, comes from a verse in the Aeneid that narrates the sinking of one of Aeneas’ ships destroyed by a storm during the Trojan War. The verse ‘rare swimmers in the vast whirlpool’ thus refers to a few navigators who, escaping the war, manage to save themselves from the shipwreck.43 This modern athlete wears a yellow bib marked with Bikila’s number ‘11’ and, like him, runs barefoot in an imaginary marathon that seemingly starting from the shores of the Mediterranean near Ostia, arrives in Rome following a trajectory that is markedly different from the one covered by the Ethiopian gold-medalist in 1960, compressing the distance between contemporary Rome and the Fascist one, the Olympics facilities and the shores of the sea.
Repetition in the editing of the installation challenges the assumed transparency of the medium while it also challenges the transparency of the past; in the words of critic Christina Werner, the “sequence of scenes elucidates and obscures meanings, variously shining light and casting shadows on regimes of power to warp historical narratives”.44 Here, I am particularly
interested in the visual resonance between Bikila and the Liberi Nantes runner by which the artists carve invite us to think about empathy differently, not as a transparent moral projection, but as a transhistorical and embodied process by which the past is replayed in order to complicate the relationship that the present entertains with it.The 1960 Olympics were mostly played in the Foro Olimpico, originally known as Foro Mussolini, built between 1928 and 1938 to house and train the various national athletic teams.
Fischer and el Sani also use a film reel from the Luce Institute showing the installation of the black and white mosaics that depict, the voice of the Luce journalist says, “the symbols sacred to the history of Rome and to Fascist life”, including the 1936 attack on Ethiopia which led to sanctions from the League of Nations.45 In one scene, the camera focuses on the legs of the runner visibly emulating the mosaiced ones. Such visual juxtaposition creates a historical dissonance between the body of the runner and the spaces of modernity shaped by Fascist ideology, which hailed at sport as a practice to engineer the whitening of the national body through association with a Latin Mediterranean.46
While re-enactment passes on an empathetic exchange between the modern runner and Bikila, the difference between their trajectories is essential to understand how Fischer and el Sani piece together that which hegemonic narratives about migration in the Mediterranean would instead leave to drown. As Danewid points out, the disappearance of history “has served as a bedrock for contemporary discourses of migration, solidifying the belief that the Mediterranean crisis originates outside of Europe – and that Europe, as a result, is an innocent bystander”.47 In this sense, reenactment can be used as a history lesson. Several historians have reflected on the function of historical re-enactment in developing forms of kinaesthetic empathy that not only moves the bodies of the re-enacters, but also some of the culture embodied therein.48 Pedagogical methodologies that
deploy historical empathy foster the interplay between the cognitive and affective dimension of history which learners can develop by positioning themselves in relation to actors in the past. In history education, the notion of empathy is traditionally associated with the role that fantasy and imagination play in historical reconstruction. Thinking through “the politics of imagination”, Pedwell suggests, “is necessary to interrupt assumptions of affective commensurability, transparency and truth that characterise empirical accounts of empathy in the neoliberal compassion economy”.49 More recently, educationalists have stressed the interconnectedness between cognitive processes and affective engagement in disclosing an understanding different
historical perspectives.50 Dance historian Susan Foster suggests that historical enquiry can reanimate past bodies whose traces remain in our archives, creating “a kind of stirring that connects past and present bodies”. In emphasising that empathy with the past is not a transcendental experience, but a bodily and embodied one, Foster recognizes “an awareness of moving with as well as in and through the body as one moves alongside other bodies”.51 By empathizing with Bikila’s run, the athlete in the video points to the continuity of African-diasporic presence in the city of Rome. No longer an alien body, his run does not result from a state of exception, nor is the sign of a ‘crisis’, but it has become part of a recovery plan grounded on fugitivity. The figure of the runner might stand for the embodiment of the refugee peril defined by the regime of ‘illegality’ practically and materially enacted through various forms of border and immigration laws enforcement. As anthropologist Nicholas de Genova maintains, “[e]ven as the state produces migrant ‘illegality’ as an obdurate and seemingly incorrigible ‘problem’”, these enforcement spectacles nonetheless reaffirm repeatedly the “phantasmatic invasiveness, relentlessness and ubiquity of undocumented migration” which serves the exploitation of the ‘illegal’ migrant as an axiom of securitization.52 However, as the runner follows in the steps of Abebe Bikila – “I replay, I replay, I replay the footage of Abebe Bikila” – he can be said to also challenge the “grammar of captivity” notably theorized by Hortense Spillers and interlaced with the ongoingness of slavery in the present.53
Claudia Rankine writes that: “[t]hough the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night” and, to this list we might add no running.54 Indeed, the runner in Freedom of Movement challenges the historical overdetermination of his run by creating transformative resonances by means of which running is no less defined by the condition of ‘illegality’ attached to the refugee, than by the ‘fugitive politics’ that Bikila had already made manifest in 1960, in the historical context of postwar decolonization. Here, I want to tease out a theoretical as well as political opening; following Fred Moten, the runner embodies a notion of fugitivity that is inherent to the politics of Black cultural and aesthetic practices which cannot be “reducible neither to simple interdiction nor bare transgression”.55 The fugitive, Moten concludes, represents a movement that is “ungovernable”, a “desire for and spirit of escape and transgression for the proper and the proposed”,56 by which we can also intend the desire
to challenge the one-dimensional representation of the Mediterranean that is created in the historical resonance between refugee and runner. Against the pathetic representation of the refugee ‘crisis’, the runner in Freedom of Movement summons transatlantic and trans-Mediterranean memories that have a vivid resonance in the present condition of Black life.

4. Transmigration and Mimicry
My other example from Freedom of Movement considers the scenes depicting a group of pupils from the Emmaus School in Maenza who climb the imposing staircase of one of the central buildings of the EUR district, originally designed to house the Mostra della Civiltà Italiana as the focal point of the perpendicular urban scheme of what should have been the world fair of 1942.
Also known as the Square Colosseum, the building strikes for its symmetrical look and architectural rigidity. On the attic of the façade, an inscription is repeated four times on each side of the building, as it were to increase the volume of its message. The text, carved out from white travertine in large block letters, was meant to celebrate Italians according to a Fascist colonial
representation of national history, as: ‘A nation of poets, of artists, of heroes, of saints, of scientists, navigators and transmigrators’. The latter word, traditionally used for migratory animals, such as birds, ostensibly stands in for the more common migranti (emigrants), and acquires a particular meaning from its proximity to the word navigator (navigators). By suggesting a movement that crosses the seas for the pursuit of discovery, such heroic and romantic depiction of journeying hides the hardship and poverty that forced millions, especially from the South of the country, to emigrate to the other side of the Atlantic. Thus, the inscription embodies a colonial fantasy about expansion that the country had already turned into action in 1936 with the occupation of Ethiopia. EUR42, strategically located west of Rome along the Ostiense road that led to the ancient port of the city, is ideally projected onto the Mediterranean, as a second inscription on the neighboring Palazzo degli Uffici exemplifies: ‘The Third Rome will expand over other hills, from the banks of the sacred river to the shores of the Tyrrhenian sea’.
In her recent book In the Wake, which theorizes the confluence, in the present time of Black being, between the stream of seafoam behind the ship and the vigil for the dead, literary critic Christina Sharpe writes of “those Black people transmigrating the African continent towards the Mediterranean and then to Europe who are imagined as insects, swarms, vectors of disease”.57 Introduced to unpack the weaponization of black bodies, in Sharpe’s theoretical vocabulary transmigration “means movement across but also movement from one form to another”.58 Thus, her emphasis on the prefix trans* speaks about a multidirectional range of configurations of Black being that may take the form of “translation, transatlantic, transgression, transgender, transmogrification, transcontinental, transfixed, trans-Mediterranean, transubstantiation […], transmigration and more”.59 Though perhaps unwittingly, this collection of words cunningly itemizes poetical inversions that upset the Fascist usage of the same prefix, as well as challenges the way in which the discourse of the migrant ‘crisis’ transposes the politics of citizenship onto an essentialist politics of difference.
Beginning from an interrogation of the global interconnectedness between cargo containers and refugees vessels, global movement of goods and mass movement of people, Sharpe provides us with the critical imagination, and the theoretical tools to shorten the perceived distance between the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, or to evaluate the affective adjacency between Calais and Lampedusa.60
In Freedom of Movement similar inversions are performed by the choir singing an altered version of the text inscribed on the Square Colosseum: “We come from nations of poets, of artists, of heroes, of saints, of scientists, navigators and migrants”. Putting the stress on the recognition that they come from nations which also share comparable relationship with travel, knowledge and myth, the voices of the Emmaus School choir spoil Europe’s project to redefine migration and question the distinction between the refugee and the citizen.61 Central in Danewid’s analysis of the fragile emotionality of whiteness in the Black Mediterranean is the distinction between the stranger and the host, as two separate but interdependent positions defined by the discourse of fortress Europe. “The result is a colonial patronizing” she decrees, “of the white man’s burden – based on the desire to protect and offer political resistance for endangered others – which ultimately does little to challenge the established interpretations that see Europe as the bastion of democracy, liberty, and universal rights”.62
The altered version of the song makes a wily point about that which, as Homi Bhabha writes, “is almost the same, but not quite”. Such is the rhetorical inversion that he describes as mimicry: “a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the Other as it visualizes power”.63 By appealing to mimicry as a form of embodied cognition embedded within the capacity for historical empathy, I wish to tease out the potentiality for simulation to be at once resemblance and menace to colonial processes of racialization. Thus the identity of the choir is never defined by ‘race’, but by a song that addresses their participation in history. Essential to Bhabha’s theorization of postcolonial mimicry is farce, which marginalizes the monumentality of colonial history by using the power of that history to make it imitable. In disrupting the ambivalence of colonial discourse, the mimicry of the song therefore also disrupts the authority of the inscription. By attending to forms of embodied cognition that aesthetically enable historical resonances, I have shown that emotions can be transformative sites to reinscribe and reconnect the “drowned memory space”64 of the Black Mediterranean. Contrary to a discourse of empty empathy and
sentimentalism which appropriates the pain of the refugee and the migrant to maintain their status as illegal and racialised other, I have explored embodied processes of empathy as they take shape aesthetically through forms of resonance and mimicry which can reorganise the foundations of intersubjective participation against historical structural inequalities. SA Smythe writes that “the Black Mediterranean is a variegated site of Black knowledge production, Black resistance and possibilities of new consciousness”.65 Rethinking the way in which people move and are moved in the Black Mediterranean is one way to make space for that new consciousness to become possible.



*I would like to thank Dina Ramadan, Sarah Rogers, and Giovanna Zapperi for their generous comments on an earlier version of this essay, and especially Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani for kindly answering my questions about their work. To the students at the University of Sussex who have taken my Mediterranean Fantasies module and have inspired me with their political curiosity and affective responses, this essay is for them.


1 Chiara Giubilaro, ‘Lo spettacolo del naufragio. Migrazioni, luoghi visuali e politica delle emozioni’, in E. A.G. Arfini,
et al., eds, Visualità & (anti)razzismo (Padua: Padova University Press Press, 2019), pp. 10-21.
2 The Black Mediterranean Collective, The Black Mediterranean. Bodies, Borders and Citizenship (London: Palgrave,
2020),
3 Giubilaro, ‘Lo spettacolo del naufragio’, p. 16.
4 Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision. Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p.
111.
5 Bennett, Empathic Vision, p. 90.
6 See, Paulina Pawlika, Maria Kaźmierczak, Adam Jagiełło-Rusiłowski, ‘Empathy and Social Closeness toward
Refugees from Syria: The Mediating Role of Cultural Intelligence’, Journal of Community Psychology, 47: 1 (2019),
pp. 1-18; Naomi Head, ‘The failure of empathy: European responses to the refugee crisis’, Open Democracy, 18
February 2016, available at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/failure-of-empathy-european-
responses-to-refugee-crisis/ [accessed 6 June 2022]; Yasmin Gunaratnam, ‘“Not in my name”: Empathy and Intimacy
in Volunteer Refugee Hosting’, Journal of Sociology, 57: 3 (2021), pp. 707–724 .
7 Bennett, Empathic Vision, p. 75.
8 See Vanessa Lux and Sigrid Weigel, eds, Empathy. Epistemic Problems and Cultural-Historical Perspectives of a
Cross-Disciplinary Concept (Palgrave, 2017).
9 Susan Lanzoni, Empathy. A History (New Haven and Lodnon: Yale University Press, 2018).
10 Juliet Koss, ‘On the Limits of Empathy’, The Art Bulletin, 88: 1 (2006), pp. 139-157
11 Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, October 28 (Spring 1984), pp. 131.
12 Shaun Gallagher, ‘Empathy, Simulation, and Narrative’, Science in Context, 25: 3 (2012), p. 363.
13 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask
14 Christopher J. Lee, Franz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2015),
p. 191.
15 In response to the ‘hostility to sympathy’ avowed by many radicals in the Left, Gilroy asks to look at the practical
results of feelings when they can ‘touch the victims and offer them shelter, sustenance and warmth’. Paul Gilroy,
‘Agonistic Belonging: The Banality of Good, the “Alt Right” and the Need for Sympathy’, Open Cultural Studies, 3: 1
(2019), p. 10.
16 Carolyn Pedwell, Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014),
pp. 2-43.
17 Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy, Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
18 E. Ann Kaplan, ‘Empathy and Trauma Culture: Imaging Catastrophe’, in A. Coplan and P. Goldies, eds, Empathy.
Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 255-276.
19 Gabi Schlag, ‘Moving images and the politics of pity: a multilevel approach to the interpretation of images and
emotions’, in Maéva Clément and Eric Sangar (eds), Researching Emotions in International Relations (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 209.
20 Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Katrine Emilie Andersen and Lene Hansen, ‘Images, emotions, and international politics: the
death of Alan Kurdi’, Review of International Studies 46: 1 (2020), p. 88.
21 Artist Ai Weiwei poses as Aylan Kurdi for India Today magazine’, India Today, 1 February 2016. Available at:
https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/artist-ai-weiwei-poses-as-aylan-kurdi-for-india-today-magazine-306593-2016-02-
01 [accessed 30 March 2022].
22 Jordan Amirkhani, ‘Between citizenry and privilege: Ai Weiwei and Bouchra Khalili’, Artpractical. com, 8: 1 (2008)
Available at: http://www.artpractical.com/feature/between-citizenry-and-privilege/ [accessed 15 March 2022].
23 Giubilaro, ‘Lo spettacolo del naufragio’, p. 19.
24 Ida Danewid, ‘White innocence in the Black Mediterranean: hospitality and the erasure of history’, Third World
Quarterly, 38: 7 (2017), p. 1675.
25 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).
26 I borrow this expression from Christina Sharpe, In the Wake. On Blackness and Being (Durham and London: 2016).
27 See Gaia Giuliani, ‘Afterword: The Mediterranean as Stage: Borders, Memories, Bodies’, in G. Proglio (ed.),
Decolonizing the Mediterranean: European Colonial Heritages in North Africa and the Middle East (Cambridge:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), pp. 91-103.
28 Russell King, ‘A Geographer’s Perspective on Migration, Identity and Space’, in T. Linhard and T. H. Parsons (eds),
Mapping Migration, Identity and Space (Aldershot: Palgrave Macmillan 2019), p. 344, n.10.
29 UNHCR, ‘As Mediterranean Sea Arrivals Decline and Death Rates Rise, UNHCR Calls for Strengthening of Search
and Rescue’, UNHCR, 7 June 2018. Available at:
http://www.unhcr.org/news/briefing/2018/7/5b3f270a4/mediterranean-sea-arrivals-decline-death-rates-rise-unhcr-
callsstrengthening.html [accessed 6 June 2022].
30 UNHCR, ‘The sea route to Europe: The Mediterranean passage in the age of refugees’ (1 July 2015), p. 6.
Available at: https://www.unhcr.org/uk/protection/operations/5592bd059/sea-route-europe-mediterranean-passage-
agerefugees.html [accessed 13 April 2022].
31 UNHCR, ‘The sea route to Europe’, p. 6.
32 Iosif Kovras and Simon Robins, ‘Death as the Border: Managing Missing Migrants and Unidentified Bodies at the
EU’s Mediterranean Frontier’, Political Geography 55 (2016), p. 40. Maurizio Albahari, ‘After the Shipwreck:
Mourning and Citizenship in the Mediterranean, Our Sea’, Social Research: An International Quarterly, 83: 2 (2016),
p. 275.
33 Kirstine Nordentoft Mose and Vera Wriedt, ‘Mapping the Construction of EU Borderspaces as Necropolitical Zones
of Exception’, Birkbeck Law Review, 3: 2 (2015), pp. 278-304.
34 Glenda Garelli and Martina Tazzioli, ‘The Biopolitical Warfare on Migrants: EU Naval Force and NATO Operations
of Migration Government in the Mediterranean’, Critical Military Studies, 4: 2 (2018), p. 181.
35 Eugenio Cusumano, ‘The Sea as Humanitarian Space: Non-governmental Search and Rescue Dilemmas on the
Central Mediterranean Migratory Route’, Mediterranean Politics, 23:3 (2018), pp. 387-394.
36 Alexandra Délano Alonso and Benjamin Nienass, ‘Introduction: Borders and the Politics of Mourning’, Social
Research, 83: 2 (2016), pp. xix-xxxi.
37 The Black Mediterranean Collective, The Black Mediterranean, p. 12.
38 The Black Mediterranean Collective, The Black Mediterranean. p. 11.
39 The obelisk was famously returned to Ethiopia under Berlusconi’s government in 2005. See Alessandro Triulzi,
‘Displacing the Colonial Event: Hybrid Memories of Postcolonial Italy’, Interventions, 8:3 (2006), pp. 430-443.
40 Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani, Freedom of Movement (2017).
41 Léa Battais, ‘Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani, Freedom of Movement’, Manifesta 13 Marseille – Les Paralléles du
Sud (2020). Available at: https://www.fischerelsani.net/texts/freedom-of-movement/ [accessed 30 May 2022].
42 Fred Moten, Stolen Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).
43 See the webpage of the association Liberi Nantes: https://www.liberinantes.org/en/chi-siamo/ [accessed 1 June
2022].
44 Christina Werner, ‘Freedom of Movement – A Momentary Flight’, roots§routes, Vol. 9, n. 35 (2021), n.p. Available
on: https://www.roots-routes.org/freedom-of-movement-and-impero-dei-segni-by-nina-fischer-and-maroan-el-sani/
[Accessed 16 May 2022].
45 Fischer and el Sani, Freedom of Movement.
46 On this issue and its populist resonances contemporary Italy, see Angelica Pesarini, ‘When the Mediterranean
Became Black: Diasporic Hopes and (Post)colonial Traumas’, in Black Mediterranean Collective, eds, The Black
Mediterranean, pp. 31-55.
47 Danewid, ‘White Innocence in the Black Mediterranean’, p. 1680.
48 Katherine Johnson, ‘Performing Pasts for Present Purposes: Re-Enactment as Embodied, Performative History’,
in D.Dean, Y. Meerzon, and K. Prince, eds, History, Memory, Performance, (Aldershot: Palgrave McMillan, 2014),
pp. 36–52.
49 Pedwell, Affective Relations, p. 4.
50 See K. C. Barton and L. S. Levstick, Teaching History for the Common Good (Mahwah: Lawrence and Erlbaum,
2004).
51 Susan Foster, ed., Choreographing History (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1995), p. 7.
52 Nicholas de Genova, ‘Spectacles of Migrant “Illegality”: the Scene of Exclusion, the Obscene if Inclusion’, Ethnic
and Racial Studies, 36: 7 (2013), pp. 1190-1191.
53 Hortense Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’, Diacritics, 17: 2 (1987), pp. 64-81.
54 Claudia Rankine, ‘The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning’, The New York Time Magazine, 22 June 2015.
Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/magazine/the-condition-of-black-life-is-one-of-mourning.html
[accessed 30 April 2022].
55 Fred Moten, ‘The Case for Blackness’, Criticism, 50: 2 (2008), p. 179.
56 Moten, Stolen Life, p. 131.
57 Sharpe, In the Wake, p. 15.
58 Sharpe, In the Wake, p. 138, n.21.
59 Sharpe, In the Wake, p. 30.
60 Sharpe, In the Wake. p. 29.
61 Werner, ‘Freedom of Movement – A Momentary Flight’, n.p.
62 Danewid, ‘White Innocence and the Black Mediterranean’, p. 1675.
63 Bhabha, ‘On Mimicry and Man’, p. 126.
64 Danewid, ‘White Innocence and the Black Mediterranean’, p. 1679.
65 SA Smythe, ‘The Black Mediterranean and the Politics of the Imagination’, Middle East Report, 286 (Spring 2018),
available on: https://merip.org/2018/10/the-black-mediterranean-and-the-politics-of-the-imagination

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