MEDITERRANIA

Exhibited in “Here, There, and Everywhere: Eurasian Cities.”. Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, South Korea. 2015.

Birds knew about it. The most dangerous migration is the one between the Sahara desert and the Mediterranean Sea. Choosing the wrong sea current could be lethal, especially if one does not know how to swim. Only islands found on the way could offer safe land to rest and hope. The hope for a return, the desire for reproduction.

For their irresponsibility, inhabitants of former Eurasia undergo a return to the original/natural condition: the migration. The interregnum of finance and cyber-capitalism had accomplished its ephemeral fate. Europe was now completely provincialized from its former colonies throughout the world, themselves involved in the disastrous global competition.

The abuse of fracking and the drilling of maritime geological extraction for shale-oil and shale-gas had produced irreversible environmental upheavals: the flooding of land among all.

The many oil rigs dotted now the new landscape, land, and sea. The excessive expansion of the Suez Canal, with the consequent increase in the traffic merchant marine, had to gape the land, giving space to the sea and to floating artificial implants. The water flow of the Nile had become vastly more significant than that of the Amazon. Global warming and melting glaciers did the rest. The morphology of the Earth's crust and every other previous geographical boundary in this part of the world would be remembered as an archeological-cartographic memoir.

The Mediterranean Sea became a center for the new world again. It has expanded to such an extent as to become a proto-Ocean. Its polluted water had radically changed its physical and chemical characteristics, such as salinity, and the maritime fauna. There were no more territories defined by "national" borders. No countries but transits of sea routes, approximately monitorable by obsolete drones and GPS, still, poorly functioning. The only new "lands" remained habitable by Eurasians were the former oil rigs in the neo-Mediterranean Ocean.

"Mediterrania" began as Eurasian Confederation of the Autonomous Communities living on Oil rigs in the Ocean archipelago of the Mediterranean Sea. A new institution born as a pact of resistance-existence between peoples. As such, it does not have absolute sovereignty, nor it offers citizenship nor a territory. It is a non-state, without borders and ethnic identity. At this point, the migration changed direction, and from the north of the world, people started to go south, toward PanAfrica. Meanwhile, the African continent closed its borders. Rejected and condemned to permanent nomadism in the sea, the Eurasian populations were forced to create a new civilization in the Mediterranean living on the former oil-rigs and among its scraps and the waste produced during its entire industrialization.

Team leader: Cristiano Luchetti. Team: Romano Martini, Ali Al-Sammarraie, Rami Abdelhamid