"The Restless Earth" at La Triennale di Milano

by Barbara Casavecchia

Migration is a pressing issue in Italy, where nearly two hundred thousand migrants landed in 2016 and over five thousand lost their lives at sea. The opening of “La Terra Inquieta” (The Restless Earth, a title borrowed from a collection of poems by Édouard Glissant) occurred right in the middle of a storm in the Italian media amid claims that NGOs were helping migrants get across the Mediterranean by rescuing them from drowning. After the European border agency Frontex released its “risk analysis” report for 2017, Italian populist politicians accused NGOs of acting like “sea taxis” and colluding with human traffickers. A week after the vernissage, the police carried out an over-Instagrammed operation on migrants gathered near Milan’s Central Station, with the aim of “cleansing” the area and restoring decorum. Like numbers, images play a key role in this infowar.

With “La Terra Inquieta,” curator Massimiliano Gioni not only deals with borders and crossings as a theme, but positions the exhibition itself in a border area, where the same conflict – between information, aesthetics, documentation and exploitation – plays out that the media regularly trespasses into while circulating images of migrants and refugees. And while Gioni’s ideological stance is clearly concerned to recognise the urgency of the crisis and make his audience react to it, it’s also evident that several of the works he selected (by over sixty artists) argue in favour of the “right to opacity”, to quote Glissant again. Take, for instance, a selection of videos made over the past four years by the Syrian collective Abounaddara, which reject the victimisation of individuals living war zones, as well as Phil Collins’s memorable video how to make a refugee (1999), which documents how a film crew constructs a pitiful portrait of a Bosnian family. Khaled Jarrar’s Infiltrators (2012) shows the attempts of groups of ordinary Palestinians to cross the over-four-hundred-mile-long wall erected by Israel around the Occupied Territories, while in This Lemon Tastes of Apple (2011), Hiwa K peacefully “infiltrates” a political demonstration in his hometown of Sulaimany, in Northern Iraq, playing the harmonica together with a guitarist giving a rendering of Once Upon a Time in the West.

Reality and fiction collide over and over again: one of the best juxtapositions is between dramatic photos by the four recipients of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography – which focus on the Balkan route followed mostly by Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan migrants – and forty-three sheets from the series The Sun Shines on a Graveyard and a Garden Alike, and the Rain a Loyal Man from a Traitor Knows Not (2016–2017) by Iranian-born, Dubai-based Rokni Haerizadeh. After printing news media stills, the artist delicately repaints the figures and their surroundings with gesso, watercolor and ink, so that destruction and brutality are turned into a surreal theatre (of cruelty). Its context is still readable, but any overexposure is mitigated.

An archival section, with period photos by Lewis Hine and covers of the illustrated magazine La Domenica del Corriere, documents the massive Italian emigration that created a diaspora of over 23 million of people between 1860 and the 1970s. It’s telling, I think, that this image-based exhibition finds its climaxes where images are missing: one high point is an indignant and heart-breaking letter of appeal sent to the EU authorities in 2012 by the mayor of the tiny islands of Lampedusa and Linosa, asking how “such a tragedy can be considered normal” and if “the European policy on immigration views this offering of human lives as a way to reduce the influx, or even as a deterrent”. Another is one of the last works on show, Banu Cennetoglu’s The List (2005–): a series of books listing all the known refugees, migrants, and asylum seekers who have died within European borders from 1993 until today: over 30,000, the last update says.

BARBARA CASAVECCHIA is a writer based in Milan.

The exhibition at La Triennale di Milano is on view until August 20, 2017.