La “protezione del mare”. Le soglie dello sguardo innanzi alle tragedie nel Mediterraneo

[Autom. eng. transl.] Between excesses of visibility and attempts to avoid idealized and fictitious forms that crush the migrant within the stereotype of the victim or the invader, it seems clear that the universe of the imaginary and of the symbolic construction has acquired such power as to prevent containment and control over the circulation of images around migratory phenomena. On the one hand, in fact, the images produced by contemporary media want to witness a process in fieri, whose profile is constantly changing; on the other hand, the iconographic imagery linked to the representation of the migrant subject, mostly painted by the media in a contradictory way as an invader or victim, is put in crisis. The representation of migration is therefore inevitably affected by the story of the tragedy, confirming the shared inclination to consider trauma as the narrative model par excellence of history writing, as well as the authentication device of any today's testimonial representation. In the same way, the impulse given by portable and new media technologies to tell the story in the course of its own making through photographs and videos obliges us to ask ourselves not only if it is possible to write the history of contemporary migration to the present, but also to whom (which subjects, which institutions) are claiming the inscription of these looks and these stories from below.