NewPhilosopher Keeping death at a distanceAt this year’s Venice Biennale,
Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph
Büchel’s installation Barca Nos-
tra (OurBoat)is thetalkingpoint.
The wreckage of the fishing boat
departingfrom Libya onitswayto
Europe,whichsankintheMediter-
raneanin2015,drowningmostofits
passengers– upto1,100migrants–
hasbeen turnedintoa public work
of art. The wreckage of the boat,
withanirreparablesplitontheport
sideofferinga windowintothehol-
lowedhold,willsitin theArsenale,
Venice’shistoricshipyard,fromMay
untiltheexhibitionends.“Thepro-
jectfacilitatesa symbolictransferof
thestatusoftheshipwreck,”explains
the press release issued by the artist.
“[It] changes its legal status from a
former object of court evidence to
an artefact, [from being] considered
a ‘special vessel to be disposed of ’ by
ministerial decree, to a bene cultural,
a significant symbol of our ‘interest-
ing times’ and collective complicity
and memory.”
Writing in The Guardian, L or-
enzo Tondo, the newspaper’s Italy
correspondent, condemned the piece:
“displaying [the] wreckage in such a
purely artistic context – far from the
institutions that were responsible for
the tragedy or the communities that
witness this kind of horror year in,
year out – risks losing any sense of
political denunciation, transforming
it into a piece in which provocation
prevails over the goal of sensitising the
viewer’s mind.” The art critic, Walde-
mar Januszczak, forcefully disagreed:
“I found it dark, upsetting, accusatory,
and powerful... to suggest that thepiece somehow glorified or ignored
death is, at best, plain wrong.”
What is certain is that a site where
hundreds of people met a terrifying
death has been transformed into a
high-profile art exhibition. A horrific
crime scene, a location of mourning,
is also a public display. Today, while
the average westerner’s day-to-day en-
counter with death is rare – something
we only experience when we, or a rela-
tive, dies, and then, often at a distance,
in a hospital and medicalised – our
public culture is saturated in images
and talk of death. It is a remarkable
shift from earlier eras.
In his masterful Western Attitudes
Toward Death from the Middle Ages
to the Present, the French historian
Philippe Ariès delineated five different
ways of thinking about and experienc-
ing death over 1,000 years of Europe-
an history. Beginning with the Middle
Ages, which he described as “tamed
death”, over the centuries humansby Tiffany Jenkins
Keeping death
at a distance