Author Ifor Duncan

Ifor Duncan, “The Shipwrech Starts Here”, in Oceans as Archives, edited by Kristie Patricia Flannery, Renisa Mawani, Mikki Stelder, 219-241 (Routledge, 2025).

This chapter is a complementary text to the two-channel video Il Naufragio Inizia da Qui, which adopts the conceptual lens of a shipwreck society to critique the use of repurposed cruise ships to quarantine migrants in the south of Italy during the COVID 19 pandemic. Video and text start with protests in the seaside town of Amantea, Calabria, where a group of people locked down in a “reception centre” contracted covid. The protest had the intention of interning these people onto quarantine vessels. During a period in which solidarity at sea and on land is under assault, the chapter explores how a nationalist imaginary of detention aspires to return those who arrive to seek refuge by boat, under precarious conditions, back to the sea and to the risk of shipwreck once more. Under the auspices of a system of hospitality the sea is turned into a space of floating detention and incarceration (Peters ed. 2022). 

The shipwreck has been a crucial allegory for internal state turmoil (Blumenberg, 1985) whilst also shadowing the devastating global processes of oceanic modernity both afloat and ashore (Mentz, 2015). As a device to articulate conditions both at sea and on shore, the chapter reflects on the eco-pedagogical phrase “Il mare inizia da qui” (the sea starts here), through the video’s use of disjunctures of sound and image to produce an immersion in the sea whilst on land and on the land from the position of the sea. These disjunctures allow for a reflection on the ways different actors – asylum seekers and activists challenging detention practices – perceive their relationship with the sea. In doing so, the central question emerges: is it also possible to say that from the land ‘il naufragio inizia da qui’? Or, does the shipwreck start here?

DOI