Make a Boat !

Every day we are more and more overwhelmed by an enormous amount of data and it is easy to feel detached from the tragedies of the contemporary era when these are described by a bunch of numbers.

The art installation “Make a Boat!” moves from the immense and invaluable work carried out by UNITED with the ‘List of Deaths’, that is the list of the 36,570 documented deaths of refugees and migrants caused by the restrictive policies of the “Fortress Europe”.

“Make a Boat!” fluctuates between performance art and data visualization.

The online list, despite having an incredible value as an archival testimony, loses its communicative effectiveness when the deaths it collects leave the world of physical bodies to enter the world of virtual alphanumeric characters.

If the length of the list and the proliferation of numbers let us imagine a scary amount of tragedies, the effect is faded by the fact that it is impossible to view the list in its entirety at the same time on a computer screen.

In a world pervaded with data, numbers tend to fade and disappear, especially if they are not paired with an image that might give them persistence. “Make a Boat!” intends to explore the communicative potential that the ‘List of Deaths’ offers by bringing the data back to the material world.

The list was therefore printed, cut (!), accumulated in a ream of A5 sheets that has a tangible thickness, a sensitive weight, an in(de)finite number of sheets. A sign invites the user to take a sheet and make a paper boat with it, following the instructions.

The idea is that the user can engage in a manual relationship with this list, touch it, fold it, read excerpts of numbers, pieces of life and death that fold together.

The  rituality of the act of creating the boat puts the user in a state of emotional tranquility which is the condition that allows the data to be transferred from the list/archive to the individual memory/USB.

Using the hands as well as the eyes, interacting with other users, that is, reciting a performative act, has the aim of building a solid and performing mnemonic container over time, so that even if one day the numerical data will have disappeared, it will remain the human and political sense of the list.

The installation does not say what to do with the paper boat, but leaves the user the freedom to decide how to dispose of it (keep it? Put it down? Throw it away?) And what value to attribute to it.

Curiously, in the exhibition for the Grande Vento 2018, after some boats had been placed at the foot of the installation, many of the subsequent users decided to behave in the same way, transforming the artistic installation into a sort of homage to the dead and creating a kind of collective cathartic performance, a possibility that had not been taken into consideration during the creation of the work.