Crossing the immensity of the Mediterranean both historical and imaginary, Daniel García Andújar’s personal exhibition “Corso patent(Letter of Marque) offered a disconcerting account of how the sea has been a place of expulsions and migrations throughout European history. In works ranging from installations and videos to archival exhibitions and a presentation of historical paintings, we have seen how mare nostrum has witnessed the “bare life” – to use an expression of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben – of migrants and refugees.
Occupying the entirety of a bright red wall in the middle of the exhibition, Mediterranean. Atlas. Ports (Mediterraneum. Atlas. Ports), 2022, presented a set of 163 “robotic drawings” which trace on old maps the possible combination of routes taken by migrants over the years to reach the various ports and harbors that line its coasts. A dry and mechanical rendering completes the frenzied entanglement of the streaks of Missing migrants registered in the Mediterranean since 2014 (Missing migrants registered in the Mediterranean since 2014), also 2022, which filled an adjacent wall with a multitude of drawings indicating the total number of migrants who failed in their attempts to cross the sea: a continuous count of dead or undiscovered bodies . Andújar’s treatment of these cases transforms the indescribable fate that migrants face into insensitive maps and measures. The cold reckoning of human life and experience in the datasets that make up these two works trivializes the events surrounding them.
From this data-driven factuality, the exhibition proceeded to interrogate the powerful hold of the Mediterranean on the European imagination, alluding not only to contemporary political debates, but also to how the sea has been used to allegorize the threshold beyond which the other is found. In the two 17th century oil on canvas paintings by Vicent Mestre that greeted visitors at the entrance to the exhibition, we followed the plight of the Moriscos (Muslim descendants forced to convert to Christianity) as they were expelled from Spain and sent to sea (Embark from los moriscos in el puerto de Denia [Moriscos Embarking at the Port of Denia], 1612–13). Their boats ended up invading the shore of Oran in northwestern Algeria (Desembarco de los moriscos en el puerto de Orán [Moriscos Landing at the Port of Oran], 1612–13), where most of them were said to have been robbed or killed. In both paintings, the sea symbolizes the unknowable: a way to obscure its origins as well as a passage beyond the canvas, where Morisco life is projected beyond historical memory.
Juguete de los hados (Forced by the Fates), 2022, a video of a refugee boat with a caged statue of Poseidon on board, convincingly completes Andújar’s marine mythopoetics. Coupling the mythical and the contemporary, the projection was accompanied in the exhibition space by the real boat, presented as overturned, and by the life-size imprisoned god. The vastness of the sea is both the legacy of a rich culture and an oppressive inhospitality that has denied humanity to countless peoples deemed other.
