Through the words of Roberto Saviano and the images of international photographers, the book In mare non esistono taxi tells and shows the migrant crisis, stripping it of prejudice and rebuilding it on the basis of firsthand accounts.
"In open water all it takes is the slap of a wave to capsize a vessel. In open water you're told to keep going straight and that Italy is out there, but the horizon shifts and that straight line may not exist. At sea mobile phones have no signal, there's no one around and there are no taxis to call."
With these words we are catapulted into the Mediterranean Sea, into the midst of one of the greatest humanitarian crises of all time — that of migrants — which has become the battlefield of an ideological and political war that continues to claim its victims every day. The words are those of writer Roberto Saviano who, with his new book In mare non esistono taxi, wants to tackle an issue so complex that in order to be explained — and above all understood — it must be broken down: Saviano dismantles and rebuilds words, concepts and prejudices about migrants to reassemble the mosaic that is sometimes presented to us in a distorted or incomplete form.
To do so he not only presents official facts and data, but above all engages in dialogue with witnesses — those who were there and saw, assisted, lived through and learned. "Testimony is not merely a detailed account of what happens," writes Saviano. "It is not about spreading a piece of data, but about bringing proof with one's own body of what one is saying." In this case, those who bring the proof are photographers, with their work and their photographs from the sea, from the boats, from detention and reception centres.
This book will be testimony, through words, but above all through photographs.Roberto Saviano, In mare non esistono taxi
"This book is born with the clear objective of bearing witness because, in the face of lies, the most effective tool for dismantling them is founded solely on testimony. Not attacking, not comforting: bearing witness." The book sets the force of testimony against the various versions of this crisis, starting from the very expression — sea taxis — that has been applied to the NGOs operating in the Mediterranean with sea rescue operations, accused of profiting from these activities. A theme used on various occasions to feed the belly of that wave of intolerance and hatred towards those who arrive on Italian shores.
The stranger is noticed only when they disturb the daily horizon, only when they disturb the taken-for-granted imagination we have planted in our skulls.Roberto Saviano, In mare non esistono taxi
In Italy there are 5,234,000 immigrants (including those from Europe, the Americas and the rest of the world), representing 8.7 per cent of our country's population according to Istat data. As regards arrivals by sea, according to data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) cited in the book, 23,400 people landed in Italy in 2018, 80 per cent fewer than in 2017. However, 8.1 people died every day during the crossing (almost 20 per cent of those who set out are recorded as dead or missing). The total number of deaths last year was 1,311, compared with 2,872 in 2017: a fall that nonetheless corresponds to an increase in mortality at sea.
Today twice as many people die at sea as before because there is no longer anyone providing rescue.Roberto Saviano, In mare non esistono taxi
It falls to the experiences and work of the photographers interviewed in the book to put a face — and a soul — to these numbers: Olmo Calvo, Paolo Pellegrin, Giulio Piscitelli and Carlos Spottorno.
Their photographs and their words — together with all the other photographs contained in this book — have added diopters to my gaze and will add them to yours.Roberto Saviano, In mare non esistono taxi
Each with their own style, sensibility and journey. Beginning with Giulio Piscitelli, who in 2011 was the only journalist and photographer to have embarked on a voyage by boat from Tunisia to Italy, only to be left adrift and rescued by the Coast Guard. His camera also documented those migratory routes that are sometimes forgotten — those through the desert, where around 2,500 people lose their lives every year trying to cross it.
The brief moment of shock we experience looking at these photographs does not push us to reason about the deep causes of what we see. The migration issue is very complex. A single photograph, however powerful, cannot sum it up.Giulio Piscitelli, photographer
Paolo Pellegrin, with his powerful black and white, speaks about the role of photography: "Imagining a world without photographers, without people who go and look, is a world that frightens me. I prefer to run risks […] rather than think of a boat of migrants leaving the shores of Turkey or Libya with no one seeing or knowing anything." Then the Spanish photographers Olmo Calvo, who followed the rescue aboard the vessel Proactiva Open Arms, turned away by Italy and Malta and welcomed by Barcelona, and Carlos Spottorno with his testimony photography, of truth, as author Saviano defines it.
Then there are the faces of those who rescue. Such as that of Irene Paola Martino, a nurse with Médecins Sans Frontières, who acts through her "art of caring for others," welcoming, healing, listening and collecting stories — sometimes silent ones, told by the marks on the bodies of those who arrive. "And then comes the slap of the first rubber dinghy seen with your own eyes, when you reach out your arm and almost touch it," she recounts. "And the numbers turn into people, who have a name, who exist, hope and dream just like all of us. In that moment you realise that about migrants and migration you know absolutely nothing and you have to start all over again."
At sea you forget everything you know and you become human again. You realise that where you are born is simply a matter of luck, that you could have been on that dinghy, but instead you were fortunate.Irene Paola Martino, nurse with Médecins Sans Frontières
Finally, the voices of those who have arrived, who have survived. "When the sea journey begins you know that journey is the last: either you arrive alive or you stay at sea," recounts John, a 22-year-old Eritrean refugee, whose journey lasted years and cost thousands of dollars.
Stories like his open windows of truth onto what happens before departure, as in Libya, where detention centres are "open-air prisons" marked by violence and abuse, where more than 700,000 people are held.
The voices of those locked in the Libyan hell with no way out are never at the centre of the story. And yet, as background noise, in the refrains caught between the rhetoric of closed ports and the need to resist and show one's humanity, there is a place, a country with which Europe strikes deals to block migrants from departing.Roberto Saviano, In mare non esistono taxi
The book, published by photography agency Contrasto, and enriched by the photographs of Martina Bacigalupo, Lorenzo Meloni, Alessandro Penso, Moises Saman and Massimo Sestini, is a book that pushes us to rethink our conception of this crisis, that immerses us in it, so that we may understand — with the time it requires — its complexity, which in the schizophrenia of our daily lives reaches us like a brief jolt, but is in reality a slow, long, silent journey. In mare non esistono taxi is a book that seeks, and is destined, to endure.
Out on the open sea there is never any time, out on the open sea there are no taxis. At sea, people die.Roberto Saviano, In mare non esistono taxi