Tsedaye Makonnen’s Astral Sea: Critical Refugee Studies and the Black Mediterranean

Over the last decade, thousands of asylum seekers have attempted to reach European shores by way of the Mediterranean Sea.¹ On April 19, 2015, a ninety-foot fishing boat that departed from Libya and carried between 700 and 1,100 asylum seekers capsized while attempting to find refuge on Lampedusa, an Italian island between Tunisia and Sicily.² The original boat and victims’ remains were recovered from the seabed by the Italian navy in 2016, at a cost of US$39.6 million.³ Afterward, the boat was “declared an Italian object” by customs officials.⁴ In 2019, this boat was reimagined by Swiss Icelandic artist Christoph Büchel as Barca Nostra,” or “Our Ship,” as his artistic contribution to the Venice Biennale, curated by Ralph Rugoff, director of London’s Hayward Gallery.⁵ During the ship’s transport from Sicily to Venice, which created even further damage to its decomposing infrastructure, Barca Nostra was presented in its wrecked form with no identifying plaque or text. At the time, critiques from attendees, art critics, journalists, and politicians ranged greatly from disgust at the spectacle of human rights atrocity to sympathy and reverence for the boldness of Büchel’s contribution.⁶ This reception included insinuations of pro-immigration “propaganda” by Italy’s deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini.⁷ Siima Itabaaza, an artist, wrote an online petition that called to remove the work from the Biennale due to its lack of context and the erasure that the piece signified: “the violence of white people appropriating Black bodies and Black death for public spectatorship and consumption.”⁸

In direct response to Barca Nostra, Tsedaye Makonnen, a self-identified Black and Ethiopian American multidisciplinary artist, curator, doula, and mother, began the first of what would become a two-part site-specific performance series called Astral Sea.⁹ The first part of her series brought to bear the contradictions of Barca Nostra’s value as an art object versus its simultaneous role as a sacred funerary memorial. At the Biennale, Makonnen’s performance was a durational act akin to a lone funeral procession, in which she walks slowly and solemnly in front of Barca Nostra while repeatedly casting in front of her a long blue cloth, meant to honor those asylum seekers who had died aboard the ship and remain unnamed at the Biennale. An acclaimed artist whose care with themes of refuge, memory, and forced migration have merited several major fellowships and residencies, Makonnen’s performance at the Venice Biennale draws on her career-long commitment to connecting histories of Black Diaspora and feminist approaches to intergenerational healing of community traumas.¹⁰ In reviewing Makonnen’s performance, I draw on two other fields of study—critical refugee studies and studies of the Black Mediterranean—to highlight Makonnen’s urgent critiques of “ownership,” as they relate to racial capitalism and memory, and especially as they manifest in debates over the appropriate memorialization of refugee crises.

In the case of Barca Nostra, the Biennale omitted mention of the origins of refugees as far as Bangladesh and Syria and closer yet, from Senegal and Tunisia, who embarked on the perilous journey to cross the Mediterranean. This refusal to remember those who did not survive, and the histories that precede them, is the central concern of this review. Makonnen’s intervention, to robustly remember migrants’ risky crossings, acknowledges her and others’ intergenerational relationships to colonial pasts. Her efforts to connect these pasts to the present situate the contemporary policing of refugees as anything but anomalous circumstances. Most strikingly, she highlights how a refusal to remember does not only scaffold policing practices of the state and international actors but also enables anti-Blackness in the policing of who and what content belongs in international art spaces. Thus, I consider Makonnen’s interventions as seeding potential South-South solidarities, solidarities that actively undo anti-refugee, Islamophobic, and other carceral logics that manifest in the “ownership” over histories of genocide.

How does memorializing contemporaneous refugee crises traffic in the language and legacies of “ownership...