Fishers of Corpses: An Anthropological Archive of Border Communities and their Responses to Migrants' Death in the Central Mediterranean through Art and Ethnography.

What is left of migrants’ death at sea, and how do migrant corpses (bodies and body remains) enter the lives of those who encounter them?

Are such remains lost forever, or do they live through the narratives of the borderland communities who accidentally receive them? As ethnography reveals most powerfully, border deaths primarily affect the families of the dead and/or missing at sea.

The aftermath of this violence is however manifold and its impact on the neighbouring communities remains an important yet neglected topic in both scholarship and practice.

Fishers of Corpses begins to fill this gap by addressing how the remains of the migrants who die in the Central Mediterranean routes to Europe affect borderland communities, leaving traces in their stories, practices, and memories.

By doing so, the main objective of the project is to re-frame border deaths from a local perspective, focusing on its border-less reverberations and exploring it as a pervasive phenomenon that concerns not only the dead and their families, but also the Mediterranean societies at large.

This inclusive shift of attention from border death to its manifold effects requires an epistemic change in conventional perspectives and debate that incorporates the lived experiences of borderland inhabitants in this tragically normalised dimension.

To do so, the project sensitively bridges a more traditional participant observation approach on board a fishing vessel (ethnographic dimension), with art methods (artistic dimension) to explore novel methodological and conceptual approaches to better comprehend and communicate the pervasive effects of border death and its aftermaths.

This methodological advance is a key element of the project, as it will allow to produce an anthropological archive of border death in the Mediterranean based on pictures, videos, oral histories and artwork produced during the research and digitally stored to be made available in open access (archival dimension).