FRANCESCO MARCHINI

Three Different Ways of Saying ‘Here’ (2019 - 2021)

A makeshift community of migrants grew and developed on a former military airbase, a space of confinement and an informal settlement that provides safety and housing for thousands of displaced people. Using the social context of Borgo Mezzanone, in Italy, as a starting point, the project engages with the difficulties of representing displaced communities. How can imagery synthesize disparate environments that contain military, capitalist, and impermeant structures, and address the relations between spaces and places that are responsible for the production of invisibility? What role does photography have in determining who is seen and who sees, and how can we visualize borders that are inscribed into the landscape without reproducing the same dynamics? Is it the case that photography can reconcile a certain, paradoxical experience of dislocation with a poetics of confinement?
As a way of representing the elusive, migrant image Three Different Ways of Saying ‘Here’ elaborates on the impact and consequences of confinement to those who are affected by it. Drawing on ideas associated with Lefebvre, and the relationship between public and private space, alongside discussions on the ‘bare life’ as addressed by Giorgio Agamben, the work uses fictional elements associated with the structural distress and the planned contingency that have been inflicted upon the migrant community since its inception. In this way, it tries to reimagine the experience of confinement beyond invisibility, countering the narrative that is usually associated in the representation of migrations and showing that, Here, the production of space amounts to nothing but a political catastrophe.