Project description
The migration crisis from the African side of the Mediterranean
Zarzis is a small coastal town in southeast Tunisia. Its stretch of Mediterranean coastline is attracting tourists… and people desperate to reach Europe. Unfortunately, not all attempts to migrate are successful. Thousands have been intercepted off the Tunisian coast, and many are lost at sea. In this context, the ERC-funded VITAL ELEMENTS project explores the migration crisis from the African side of the Mediterranean. Specifically, it will focus on the dead bodies in relation to life and sources of livelihood. To investigate how the lives of people are made permanently unliveable, the project will merge anthropology and forensic science to trace resources critical to life and sustenance and study the relationships between them.
Objective
For more than a decade, the dead bodies of people who had hoped to cross the Mediterranean have been washing ashore on the beaches of Zarzis, a coastal town in southern Tunisia. This research program starts out from the question: How did these bodies end up here?
While in Europe people who are adrift may be seen as evidence of a “migration crisis,” from the African side of the Mediterranean they point to the chronic, (neo-)colonial depletion of livelihoods. To map how life is enduringly made unliveable, this program develops the method of forensics as the art of paying attention. This method will allow us to trail exemplary vital elements—resources crucial for fostering life and livelihood—and the relations between them. Our cases include: the extraction of phosphate, the fishing of sea sponges, the cultivation of tomatoes, the extraction of water, and the leaving behind of industrial waste.
To better understand the complexity of, and material semiotic relations between, vital elements, we focus on Zarzis as a nodal point. This will make it possible for team members to visit each other’s sites and to work together in a Method Lab as well as to collaborate with local artists who will help to sensitise us to local concerns in a Vital Elements Atelier.
The research program is innovative in three ways: it (1) contributes to a decolonial shift of attention from the “migration crisis” befalling Europe to the “chronic depletion of life” afflicting Africa; (2) develops the method of forensics as an art of paying attention to ethnographically study the complexity of, and the relations between, vital elements and the ways they impact on living and dying; (3) advances the concept of vital elements for materialities that are active, make connections and foster life, or spur on death.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC - Support for frontier research (ERC)Host institution
1012WX Amsterdam
Netherlands