Fo rt y tho usand moments o f mourning
Technically, a spreadsheet that lists migrants and refugees who have died while trying to get into Europe isn’t art. The efficiently ordered data isn’t beautiful to look at or otherwise aesthetically pleasing. It’s a brutal mix of briefly described violence and incomplete sentences. Names and ages, if they’re known, go in one column; countries of origin go in another. The most detailed column reveals the ways in which the migrants died.
Some drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. Some were crushed trying to get from raft to land. Some killed themselves after their applications for asylum were denied.
Every year since 1993, the European NGO network UNITED for Intercultural Action has maintained and updated what is known as the List of Deaths as a way to monitor the human cost of Europe’s strict immigration policies. The list is free to download at unitedagainstracism.org, and as of June 19, the PDF document contains information about the deaths of 40,555 people at European borders. Turkish artist Banu Cennetog˘lu stumbled upon the list in 2002 and decided it needed to be seen by as many people as possible. Because of her efforts and those of other like-minded artists and curators around the world, the list has been displayed, in a variety of formats, in Athens, Barcelona, Berlin, and Los Angeles, among other locales, since 2006.
SITE Santa Fe features The List of Deaths printed on 16 pages of standard 8.5 x 11-inch paper and displayed behind Plexiglass on a 20-foot-long wall.
SITE Santa Fe’s assistant curator, Brandee Caoba, co- curated Displaced with Irene Hofmann, SITE’s Phillips director and chief curator. Caoba points out that when the media reports on war and the accompanying immigration crises, confusing or impersonal language can render death into nothing but a numbers game. “If a soldier loses their life, they’re called a troop instead of by their name, and a troop sounds like more than one person,” she says. “If you say that 40 people lost their lives this week crossing the Mediterranean, it doesn’t have the same gravity as [knowing] where they were going, where they were coming from, and why they left.”
The list offers t his information in a way t hat feels akin to found poetry. Grim as they are, the causes of death have f low and pacing; they have repeated imagery. Body found in river. Found dead in sea. Hit by car. Hit by car. Found dead on boat. Even when the dead cannot be identified by their names, the list allows for a moment to reflect on them as individuals.
At first, Cennetog˘lu handed printed lists for friends and strangers. She left copies in cafés, and even put stickers referencing the list on ATMs. But she wanted a larger format, such as a billboard, to display it on. She couldn’t afford it by herself. Because she’s an artist, she concentrated on funding sources in that arena, even though she didn’t actually consider the list to be an artwork. For five years, every potential funder shared that perspective and didn’t support the project.
According to a June 2018 article in The Guardian by Charlotte Higgins, funding from an unnamed American organization allowed Cennetog˘ lu to publish sections of the list on 150 poster sites and hold associated events at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2007. Since then, the list has appeared in newspapers, as posters in train stations, and in other public settings. In the summer of 2018, it was posted on large hoardings (roadside boards for public advertisements) in Liverpool, as part of the city’s art biennial. Vandals ripped it down twice. Higgins lamented the crime in the pages of The Guardian that August.
“It is hard to imagine the failure of compassion that would impel any individual or group to do this, especially as the list is so modest: it asks nothing of passersby other than that it should be seen. But then, we are living in dangerously fraught times. The arts, in their broadest sense, can no longer be regarded as a dull backwater some distance away from the real business of politics. Culture is the new front line. Those within the ‘alt-right’ are training their big guns on fresh targets: ‘liberal Hollywood’; the press; that defensively constructed catch-all, political correctness.”
Caoba invites visitors to take their time with the list in a quiet setting that they’ve created. She says it’s an opportunity to connect with a massive amount of difficult information using the old- fashioned medium of paper, rather than scrolling through it on a screen.
“Reading something digitally, you’re just glancing. With paper, you have to stop and turn the page.”