People on the Move: Religion, Film and Migration

Contested images addressing migration policies

In August 2018 an Italian sculptor placed a full-scale reproduction of the Vatican Pietá on a fishing boat off the coast of the small island of Lampedusa, an immigration entrance point for thousands of people in search of shelter and a better future in Europe. Fabio Viale’s Pietá senza Cristo is not an exact copy of the iconic work by Michelangelo since, as the name indicates, the body of Christ is missing. Viale has used the absent Christ as an opportunity to reconceive the great sculpture by placing it in different settings. Viale’s marble sculpture was first exhibited in 2017 in an art gallery in Milan.¹ Later, it was set up and photographed as part of a poster installation titled Lucky Ehi, in which the marble Pietá senza Cristo is presented with a naked man lying on Mary’s lap in the place of the dead Jesus. Ehi, the man at the center of the photograph, is a refugee from Nigeria who crossed the Mediterranean Sea like many others to reach the land of his dreams, Italy. Conceived as an art installation, the poster was accompanied by an audio file narrating Ehi’s risky journey.² Viale’s Pietá was then used off the coast of Lampedusa, in a further artistic action known as In mare la Pietá (The Pietá at Sea).

In both works, Lucky Ehi and In mare la Pietá, the marble sculpture Pietá senza Cristo was put in conversation with migration in the Mediterranean; the iconic representation of the desperate mother holding the corpse of her son in her arms depicts, in the words of the artist, “rather a synthesis of a dramatic historic moment.”³ For Viale, a floating, “empty” Pietá on the Mediterranean transforms a sculpture into a symbolic act of participation and empathy towards people crossing the sea. At the same time, this work can be understood as a message to the inhabitants of Europe, as a plea to question their attitudes towards refugees.⁴

Figure 1.

Christoph Büchel,Barca nostra, La Biennale di Venezia, Arsenale, Venezia 2019. (Photograph by the author). [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

A few months later, at the 58th International Art Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia 2019, the Swiss artist Christoph Büchel presented the work Barca nostra (Our Boat) in an open air zone of the Arsenale, the location where the city of Venice used to produce its famous naval fleet and where today the Biennale takes place. The art work consists of the original wreck of a Lybian ship that sank on April 18, 2015, in the Sicilian Channel with at least 700 people on board. Pulling the ship—in fact, the grave of so many people—out of the sea and transporting it to the Venetian lagoon was received as a strong, controversial action. The shipwreck simultaneously depicted the fragility of the boat and human life, as well as the fragility of the hope of its passengers. Presenting an empty tomb as a work of art, the piece challenged indifference (Fig. 1).⁵

These artistic elaborations on migration question both European policies regulating migration and individual attitudes towards an ongoing tragedy. Viale’s and Büchel’s sculptures evoke at once death and murder as well as grief and compassion; they denounce injustice and encourage participation; they provoke and comfort. They also blur places in a disturbing way: Michelangelo’s sculpture par excellence leaves the sacred walls of St. Peters and floats adrift in the Mediterranean Sea; the remains of a coffin-ship are fished out from the dark sea floor and displayed in a famous art exhibition. Controversial, the art works contest our imaginations by means of visual representation. By reframing our values and attitudes towards people on the move, they pose questions by making visible, from a new angle, what we witness every day.

Both works of art refer to religious aspects: by looking at them audiences may recall the passion of Christ or...