Anachronism, Displacement, Trace. "Scarred Images" and the Postcolonial Time Lag (original) (raw)

2017, California Italian Studies

In June of 2014, Danish sculptor and video artist Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen, after a monthlong residency at the Rome-based contemporary art organization qwatz, submerged forty-eight figures evocative of human shapes, wrapped in concrete canvas resembling funerary sheets and body bags, into the Tyrrhenian Sea near the southern Italian port town of Pizzo (Calabria). 1 The human forms were meant to serve as markers for the thousands of unidentified dead refugees and asylum seekers washing up on Italy's shores, making the Mediterranean into what some have ominously dubbed a vast "necroregion." Larsen's figures deliberately recalled the now ubiquitous images disseminated by the international press depicting rows of drowned people enshrouded by Italian authorities in anonymous sheets. 2 The figures were affixed to a wooden platform with ropes and chains, hanging vertically, like macabre pendulums. They occupied a liminal space between surface and depth, like specters at once present and absent, material and fleeting, visible and invisible, fixed and mobile, past and present. The plan for the work, titled End of Dreams, was to keep the forty-eight figures submerged in the sea for four months, incurring a degradation of their form and the growth of subaqueous forms of life-a filmy coating of algae, a host for other marine organisms (Fig. 1).