La Voz de Galicia – Abril 8, 2022 →
This week, I read an interview with the Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei (one of the models of the intersection between art and social responsibility), where he noted the difference in Europe’s treatment of Ukrainian refugees and refugees from other conflicts. In his documentary, Human Flow (2017), he made an incredible human and artistic journey through forty refugee camps in more than twenty countries, showing the difference between what is being said is being done and what it is really being done when countries speak of taking in refugees.
And then I remembered the video from Forensic Architecture, a research agency at the University of London that investigates «human rights violations including violence committed by states, police forces, militaries, and corporations.» The video, titled The Left to Die Boat, provided a reconstruction of the movements of a rubber boat that left the Libyan coast in March 2011, at the moment of NATO’s military intervention in Libya, showing the way that different entities present there left to die, during fourteen days, the passengers who attempted to seek refuge escaping Libya toward Italy: «Despite several distress signals relaying their location, as well as repeated interactions with at least one military helicopter and a military ship, they were left to drift.» Of the seventy-two passengers, nine survived, and with their collaboration, in addition to the research done on satellite images, the organization began a legal battle to search for those responsible for those deaths, a battle that has not yet found those who are culpable, because eleven years later, a crime has not even been recognized…
