5 - The Border as Abjecting Apparatus: Shipwreck at the Threshold of Europe, Lesvos, Aegean Sea (2020) and Purple Sea (2019)

Summary

At the end of the summer on August 18, 2015, a boat capsized in the Aegean carrying migrants from Turkey to Greece. It was not the only boat that had sunk in that turbulent summer. Already five months earlier on April 18, 2015, between 700 and 1,100 people had lost their lives in one of the worst shipwrecks in the Mediterranean when the ship they were on sank in the waters between Libya and Lampedusa. In 2014, over 5,000 and in 2015 almost 7,000 people perished making the crossing. But on August 18, something important for our understanding of the dangerous crossing happened; the filmmaker Amel Alzakout wore a waterproof Contour camera on her wrist that recorded the journey and the tragic shipwreck. Luckily, she survived the ordeal and made it eventually to Berlin, where she was able to settle and begin to work. The visual material she captured chronicled the experience of a wreck, lost lives, and a rescue at sea operation. Alzakout’s material has come to serve as key incitement to two recent film projects: Purple Sea (Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed, 2019) and Shipwreck at the Threshold of Europe, Lesvos, Aegean Sea (Forensic Architecture, 2020). This chapter considers these films closely; it also draws from them in its general reflections on the work of the moving image in representing migrant experience and on the work of the border as an abjecting apparatus.

On a certain level, this work joins a series of films about the 2015 migrant wave that includes Fuocoammare (Gianfranco Rosi, 2016), Human Flow (Ai Weiwei, 2016), Sea Sorrow (Vanessa Redgrave, 2017), and It will be Chaos (Lorena Luciano and Filippo Piscopo, 2018). These films have a broader focus and contain images of masses drawn from the twenty-four-hour news reporting cycle. As Karen Remmler noted of these films, “images of overcrowded boats have become iconic for the plight of refugees.” We can add that the stories of these films typically begin precisely at the shore; in effect the stories begin with the people framed as a mass of refugees headed to Europe. The so-called refugee crisis presents the migrants as a crisis for their point of destination. Their backstory, where they are from, the rationales that brought them to the journey, and what transpired before they reached the shore typically play little part in the films.