During the election campaign in Abruzzo, installations depicting drowning hands appeared: a message to politicians about the migrant tragedy. Now “Mediterraneo” is becoming a viral protest.
It first appeared in the main square of Atri, a small municipality in the province of Teramo, on 3 February. A few days later it had spread to the Piazza del Duomo in Teramo and the larger city of Pescara, to the extent that CNN also covered it in a news report. From there, passing through many other municipalities in Abruzzo, as well as Nardò in Puglia, Albano Laziale and Cinisello Balsamo, it reached Rome, and on 2 March — it is already confirmed — it will fill the Piazza del Duomo in Milan. The installation in question is Mediterraneo, a work composed of dozens of cardboard hands reaching towards the sky to recall the cries for help of drowning men — like the migrants who have lost their lives at sea in recent years or were saved at the last moment by a vessel of the Coast Guard or of non-governmental organisations. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than two thousand people died throughout 2018 during makeshift crossings undertaken to reach Europe from Libya.
The authors of these flash mobs on immigration and government reception policies can be traced to an artistic collective calling itself Arte resistente, formed for the occasion and linked to a group of Abruzzo-based social organisations that came together last August under the name Rete oltre il ponte in the wake of the docking at Catania of the nave Diciotti with 177 migrants on board.
The intended recipient of the message is clear: the deputy prime minister and interior minister Matteo Salvini, who was in Abruzzo last week for the closing rally of the regional election campaign. The protesters also address a direct message to Salvini, left at the very sites of the installations, which reads:
Minister, feel free to express, here with your voters, inhuman ideas about society. Here, among these sinking hands, silent like those who, at sea, have their heads in the water. Courageous is the one who puts their own life on the line, not the one who plays with the lives of others.
The Abruzzo elections then saw the victory of the centre-right candidate, Marco Marsilio, and the strong growth of Matteo Salvini's Lega, which became the first party with over 26 per cent of the vote, but the protest initiative did not stop there: on the morning of 18 February the drowning hands appeared in Rome, in Piazza dei Mirti, at the heart of the working-class neighbourhood of Centocelle. And Arte resistente has already announced the next stop: 2 March at the Duomo in Milan. There is more, because the group's Facebook page has even published a video tutorial for making the drowning hands yourself: the initiative thus risks becoming increasingly viral.