Thalassocorpographies : a study of experimental poetry, visual arts, and performance from the contemporary Mediterranean borderscape

Abstract

This thesis examines different creative media which draw on the Mediterranean Sea as a source of artistic inspiration to reflect on borders, sense of identity and belonging, historical memory, migration, distance, loss and sense of place. Its four chapters analyse examples of experimental poetry, video performances, installations and documentaries to explore the contemporary Mediterranean space from the perspective of women artists and authors. The sea shapes their imaginary, it is part of their memories and life experience, and it is visually, semantically and conceptually present in their literary and audio-visual productions. The first chapter focuses on four women poets: the Armenian-Cypriot Nora Nadjarian; Nathalie Handal, of Palestinian origins; Isabella Leardini, from the Italian Adriatic coast, and the Lebanese Tamirace Fakhoury. The authors’ verses are compared through the image of portolan charts, mostly medieval cartographic tools used to navigate across the Mediterranean. These charts suggest numerous connections and possibilities of movement across the sea space, which is represented as an intricate network of travelling routes. The second chapter traces parallels among the documentaries My Love Awaits Me by the Sea (Mais Darwazah, 2013), Evaporating Borders (Iva Radivojevic, 2014), My Home, in Libya (Martina Melilli, 2018), and La traversée (Élisabeth Leuvrey, 2006). This section borrows Suvendrini Perera’s concept of oceanic corpo-graphies and brings it to the Mediterranean borderscape. The third chapter deals with migrant objects in video performances and installations. It includes the work of the Lebanese live artist Tania El Khoury; of Klitsa Antoniou, from Cyprus, and of the Istanbul-based Turkish performer artist Didem Erk. This portion of thesis draws upon Sara Ahmed’s theory of stickiness, according to which objects can accumulate affective value on their surface. The last chapter presents some photographic projects by the French photographer Aglaé Bory, who depicts Mediterranean migrants along their travelling routes, and Tamara Abdul Hadi, who was born to Iraqi parents and narrates the south and east of the Mediterranean through images. These pictures, and the relations which can occur between individuals and landscape, are analysed through Doreen Massey’s theory of space. The key concept of this project is the idea of thalassocorpographies, which, comprising the act of writing, the body and the sea, calls attention to the network of movements, trajectories and histories that are inscribed by bodies across the maritime space. Thalassocorpographic lines intersect, disconnect, develop in all directions and give resonance to localised and peripheral stories that are often left out of frame in mainstream Mediterranean narratives. This criss-cross image helps to picture the sea as a borderscape, which functions as a point of convergence for the paths and routes of those subjects who are rejected by conventional logics of belonging and existing within territorial and national spaces.