Vik Muniz: Lampedusa
Vik Muniz's floating installation Lampedusa was launched during the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. Constructed in commemoration of the 360 immigrants who drowned during their journey from Libya to Italy, the 14-meter-long paper boat was coated with a giant reproduction of the Italian newspaper that reported the tragedy. The gargantuan paper boat drifted along the Canal Grande, Venice's main transportation route, docking near luxury yachts. As art critic Jonathan Jones wrote in The Guardian, "this art project has been overtaken by real-life horror. Perhaps, in theory, it seemed reasonable to make a vaguely thought-provoking, 'playful' piece about migration. But now the scale of our cruelty, the true consequences of all the rhetoric that dehumanises migrants, have become so lethally clear. Surely, art on such a theme should be less equivocal, more angry."
Brazilian-born Muniz gained worldwide fame after his popular documentary Waste Land (2010). He arrived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant in 1982 and lived off the grid for about a decade, until he was recognized as an artist and was granted permanent residency. "I was living in these intolerable conditions, doing cleaning jobs and working at gas stations for less than minimum wage, just to keep my head above water. Somehow, I was able to push through as an artist and become a legal citizen," recalled Muniz in an interview.
There is perhaps no image more naive and optimistic than a plainly folded paper boat. Ferrying across lakes, canals, and puddles, paper boats encapsulate the dreams and hopes of children – a chilling contrast to the crushed hopes of the refugees. Those who deliver all their possessions into the hands of rapacious boatmen for a chance to escape a futile existence are cast off, penniless, onto the unwelcoming shores of Europe. There, they might find work and become legal citizens, or be driven back into the sea, forced to return to the same place from which they fled.
Muniz's work is a harrowing reflection on our future and the future of our children, seen in his eyes as a dark abyss of uncertainty. His work refuses to consider the future with wide-eyed romanticism or apocalyptic dread, evoking instead a chaotic amalgam rife with contradiction. Opposing realities coexist as parallel universes for different populations, in different parts of the world – or, sometimes, even in our own back yard.