Cover photo: Rescue team of Mediterranea Saving Humans – night rescue aboard of Abba1 Rhib, 14th rotation. ©MedRescue
I made my first rescue at sea on May 2019, during my fifth rotation in the then still young project Mediterranea Saving Humans. My arrival aboard the Mare Jonio—a 70’s tug boat repurposed as a mother ship for the organization—was, that time, quite gradual. Landing on Lampedusa Island, where the boat was docked for a needed stopover, I should have taken over from other fellow rescuers who were disembarking, to join as RHIB driver – rigid hull inflatable boats that we use to reach boats in distress. Yet, we spent some time on land preparing to set sail, followed by some days at sea amongst drills and fixing equipment. This slight delay gave me the time to slowly walk into a transforming landscape.
The overall experience of sea rescue requires and implies one grapple with a phenomenology of changing space, that always brings an observation of an alternative shaping of it. And of course, as well as coping with through-sea-migrations, it’s not a thing that one can achieve in one go, and it is always a compound intertwining of conditions suffered on land and projected on the sea routes, and again an extension of the floating destinies over the land to reach. A reality that people on the move are definitely—and obviously—more aware of.
We started learning about this reality during our first rotations in the previous fall, when out of bad meteomarine conditions and a lack of experience we were forced to stop at Zarzis in Tunisia. Even if prevented to operate there, we began to observe differently, listening to the other shore of the Central Mediterranean, talking with fishermen and learning from them about departures. We also connected with initiatives helping people to overcome the last stretches of the Sahara Desert.
After the first calm days of the fifth rotation, we sailed by the two Italian Gas and Oil Company ENI platforms: Bouri Field DP4, the biggest in all the Mediterranean Sea, and DP3, about 70 nm north of the Libyan shores. I felt myself observing a significant landscape transformation. A landscape that was given a new intelligibility thanks to the six months of sea patrolling and experiences like the one in Zarzis. I had seen the platforms before, but spotting their flare tips burning in the night, at the top of the stacks, appeared to me as a gloomy nocturnal dawn, in which the Italian colonialist legacy seems to re-emerge as a present of exploitation and contradictions; splitting the perception of the landscape. To paraphrase Kevin Lynch’s City Landscape lexicon, the platforms and their flames were paths and nodes in a specific (economic) district, for private interests, contemporary dangerous edges as well as (sea)landmarks for sailing or drifting migrants.
I came to call this episode the three black suns of Sabratha, because of the name of a third Libyan platform, straight ahead almost 10 nautical miles south, visible at night under a crisp sky. Here I saw an emerging line-of-force shaping and governing space. Yet, I was wrong to make of this episode the most significant—in the following hours there would be the most important turn in the perception and visibility of that landscape
The night near the three black suns passed quietly and sadly, because of the unsuccessful attempt to find a target we were informed about. The following day, I was suddenly woken after the night shift. Unexpectedly, the crew of the sailing vessel escorting the Mare Jonio, carrying media and medical personnel, spotted a rubber boat.
We launched the main RHIB and rescued 29 people, one little child among them. The rescue went fine, steadily, good sea and weather conditions allowed us to operate calmly and carefully. Just a few hours would pass between the rescue and the disembarkation of the guests…During that time, I was approached three times by a guy from Ciad, each time he asked me to retrieve the backpack he lost as we were off-loading people from the boat in distress. Following protocols, prioritizing the safety of persons, I couldn’t grab it, promising that we would try to find it later. I searched the rubber boat, but without finding anything. During the night the guy asked me about the backpack twice. Soon before the disembarkation he did a third time and by then I stopped him to say: “Hey maybe you had papers in it, don’t worry we will follow-up, we will provide help with that.” He replied: “I had no papers in the bag, but photographs of my land, my home.”
That struck me, significantly. I missed something, I didn’t recognize that person and the landscape for him was changing, I don’t remember his name. Our way to sea was somehow being found, the one “to see”—or at least mine—still to be earned.

Learning the Sea, Learning to See
What went wrong? It wasn’t about help—I did try to help. I didn’t fail in that, but I failed in seeing. And yet Mediterranea was born just under a year later without having addressed this oversight.
In June 2018, as a bunch of activists coming from different stories of radical politics, we believed we were observing and recognizing a meaningful turn in the field of humanitarian intervention; especially in the Civil Sea Rescue context.
Populist and racist parties were taking over European Institutions and especially the Italian government—with the appointment of Matteo Salvini, Italian Lega’s leader, as Minister of the interior of affairs—we witnessed the final stages in the erasure of the last traces of humanity, with the hand over to Frontex agency and its Triton and Themis operations of border controls, as well as with the role of EunavForMed and its operations Sophia and the still ongoing Irini.
The so-called strategy of the closed harbors at that time had to be accompanied with a different plot, framed in a different landscape, able to absorb the “strategy”—not even close to its application in the declared intentions of its proponents—as part of a new storytelling practice. Through these methods, the criminalization of the humanitarian came to the fore. And such a criminalization was, at the time, denounced by at least several researchers: Rossi, Stoppani, Tazzioli, among others, As a needed reaction to that criminalization, several NGOs, despite being targeted by far-right propaganda, took it upon themselves to enact a politicization of solidarity actions.
As we continue to utter and claim for the need of such a politicization, we are of course not intending for the NGOs to simply became more vanguardist, reckless or unscrupulous—let say overtly “political”. Rather, we believed that a specific process of recognition takes place, acknowledging the framework in which migrations happen not as an unmodifiable theater in which events are played, but as shifting landscapes produced by institutional policies. In turn, we can see these landscapes as spaces of struggle, with real stakes that unfold across borders.
Many activities and political campaigns, from that point on, weren’t simply “invented” or suddenly discovered, but strategically displayed as counter-narratives to the flattened image of people on the move stories, vicissitudes and lives.
For instance, in response to the expansion of border externalization, which involves the EU’s attempt to incorporate Tunisia, after Libya, in alleged SAR operations, the Civil Fleet answered with an intensification of testimonies about tortures in Libyan camps and life conditions under Saied’s authoritarian regime.
Responding to the despicable usage of smugglerization of migrants as a strategy, a group of activists launched Captain Support campaign: providing help and legal assistance to persons imprisoned, accused of driving boats or, simply, taking care of other passengers.
But, again it is not so much about help, for as important as it is. It is about recognizing our practice of helping through an effort to restore a grammar of visibility: supporting people on the move to escape the vise of a system of visibility whose jaws are constituted by a functional modulation of de-visibilization and hypervisibilization. We see this politics of solidarity as part of an already ongoing form of struggle—one foremost carried on by people that we don’t save, but encounter in our rescuing initiatives.

A Stark Frontier
If all that has been said is true, why do we continue to not see? On the one hand, one could argue that there’s no contradiction between the story I told at the beginning and what was said just above. Just because seeing is a form of struggling, it has to be gained out of a constant experience, a renewed array of practices; especially in the world of Civil Sea Rescue, where things are understood by doing and aesthetic strategies are often made tertiary to immediate objective results. Exactly as the institutional policy conditions route movement, boat material and features are routed in turn. These latter changes shift our protocols and our ability to see ongoing processes.
However, from a second point of view, I think we should remember a crucial statement of Abdelmalek Sayad for which “to think migration means to think the State, and the State thinks itself thinking to migration.” In the last years, State-technologies conceived to govern migrants, like the ones above mentioned, have been surely intensified. But if in 2018 we could still face a reactionary narrative, as appalling as it was obtuse, now we are in front of a much more dangerous acceptance of that narrative by the conservative establishment, parties and institutions. We have entered a bleak conservactionary age. The grotesque far-right claims – the naval blockade, the closed ports, the NGOs ships that are to be sunk, are now well-dressed by a more functional and acceptable metric of migration. The idea of the Mediterranean Sea as a smooth extended and neutral space on which to move the straight line of a border, is ever more substituted by the making of a Mediterranean Frontier: a space porous and streaked that stretches its features up to our territories.
This new frontier is inhabited by migrants that remained entrapped even after they land; who are still caught in passage across European countries, living in conditions of precarity and disavowal. A frontier so stark it is cloudy. Where the inclusion/exclusion modulation manages the contradictions of an aging Europe that demands agriculture and care workers without recognizing their lives as worthy of living as our own.

Gatherings
In his Hollowland, Eyal Weizman gave an important contribution to the analyses of these contemporary frontier spaces. He describes the Israeli architecture of occupation as itself a frontier, and goes on: “inhabitants of this frontier do not operate within the fixed envelopes of space—space is not the background for their actions, an abstract grid on which events take place—but rather the medium that each of their actions seeks to challenge, transform or appropriate.”
This political intervention over space, and its consequences for the visibility of persons entrapped within them happens, of course, in different ways. We can see that today through the systemic destruction of Gaza and the annihilation of its people, where the erasure of the territory is not, simply, a theatre for the massacre, but a means through which genocidal policy is perpetrated. As Weizman will stress, in the prosecution of the Nakba in the Westbank the landscape itself is at stake in the overall violence of the colonization process. Mediterranea began as an effort of witnessing and joining Palestinians in their resistance through staying.
But effects of the same intervention over space can be seen and maybe need to be recognized in embrio and on a different scale. Let us consider here the process of internalizing exclusionary policies in Europe and the territories in which too many people live. As Judith Butler states, life is made precarious by these policies through social and racial distributions. The excluded are eventually allocated an appalling condition as “ungrieveable lives”: fragmented subjects, split between their use as a workforce and their dispensability as non-citizens.
How then to face all this? How do we avoid not seeing?
In one of the last rotations I took part in, we rescued—out of almost one hundred people—two guys who were the only Syrians. One, very young, helped us as an interpreter as we did not have an Arab speaking person onboard this shift. The other, not speaking any English or French, kept a protective attitude toward the other. Soon before the disembarkation we were told by a social protection officer that the younger one, as he was underage, could have skipped many steps and headed into a welcome center. We spoke together, it was tough. The prospect of separation after more than ten months spent together in Tripoli preparing the journey, was more than harsh.
We didn’t explain, we listened, and supported them by simply offering what we knew, attempting to sustain their organization and decision. Soon after, a small crowd of resting guests surrounded us, it became an assembly. For how painful it had been, for how difficult the decision they took, we gathered. The assembly, acknowledging what was at stake for them in interrupting their bond of brotherhood, surrounded them in support—a sudden manifestation of comradeship. They organized. And I know their names.
We can keep looking for alliances and assemblies like these to restore a wider scope, a commonly built visibility, to fight against precarity and the fragmentation of our stories and our landscapes.
Fabio Gianfrancesco
Fabio Gianfrancesco is a Roman philosophy researcher and Adjunct Professor of Aesthetics at Sapienza – università di Roma, Architecture and Design Department, and an activist of the atelier autogestito ESC in Rome. When in 2018 a strategy of criminalization targeted those who made solidarity a weapon, to fight together with those forced to migrate, ESC and so many others took part in the process of collective imagination and founding of Mediterranea Saving Humans, where he is member of the political board and deputy rescue coordinator.