Scratching The Surface

How the Venice Biennale reveals problems with nationalist art patronage

- Skye Arundhati Thomas

Docked in the choppy waters of a Venetian canal, along the warehouse architecture of the Arsenale—one of two venues of the 2019 Venice Biennale—is the ruin of a 90-foot fishing boat. Titled “Barca Nostra”—Italian for “our boat”—it forms part of a project by the Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph Büchel. On the night of 18 April 2015, in waters between Libya and the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, this boat capsized, and nearly eight hundred passengers drowned or were lost at sea. Each passenger was a migrant fleeing war or famine, hoping to seek refuge in Europe. Onboard were people from Syria, Gambia, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Mali, Libya, Eritrea and Bangladesh. Only 28 people survived.

A year after it was wrecked, the boat was brought back to Sicily, where forensic experts combed through its interiors to segregate and identify the body parts and belongings left behind. The boat’s passage from Libya was an operation spearheaded by Mohammed Ali Malek, a Tunisian smuggler. Malek was seen brandishing a long wooden pole to keep his passengers in line while ferrying them to the boat in a small wooden dinghy. He contacted the Italian coastguard in Rome as soon as they hit international waters, asking for help. The coastguard responded by signalling a nearby Portuguese container ship. Witnesses saw Malek grab the steering wheel and slam it into the oncoming vessel. He was found guilty of manslaughter, and sentenced to 18 years in prison and a ¤9 million fine.

Büchel’s project to bring the vessel to Venice cost a cool ¤33 million to complete, including the original ¤9.5 million the Italian navy spent on salvaging the boat. Venice is just the first port of call; the boat will later travel to the Sicilian town of Augusta, where it will be developed into a “garden of memory.”