Page - 75 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Tony Kushner | Lampedusa and the Migrant Crisis 75 man) and the concept of ‘bare life’ has been utilised and critiqued.68 Agamben outlines why the refugee represents ‘such a disquieting element in the order of the modern nation-state... above all because by breaking the continuity between man and citizen... they put the originary fiction of modern sovereignty in crisis’.69 The concept of ‘bare life’ with regard to refugees does reflect a reality, the tens of thousands of deaths in the Mediterranean and elsewhere illustrating how even sheer survival can be tenuous. But as many have noted, it can also remove all agency from refugees, and in the case of Lampedusa, this has been and continues to be a powerful factor. In the detention centres of the island and in its everyday life, the migrants have both resi- sted and formed alliances with the local inhabitants. In February 2014 this led to the creation of the Charter of Lampedusa which was not ‘intended as a draft law’ but as the expression ‘of an alternative vision’ where ‘Differences must be considered as assets, a source of new oppor- tunities, and must never be exploited to build barriers’.70 Such bonds have been celebrated as well as problematised in Emanuele Crialise’s award winning Italian film, Terraferma (2011), Anders Lustgarten’s play Lampedusa (2015) and most recently Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary Fire at Sea (2016) which won the Golden Bear prize at the Berlin International Film Festival. It is also recognised movingly at an everyday level through the island’s cemetery where plots and headstones have been donated locally to bury both named and unnamed migrants washed 68 Giorgo Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 126- 35. 69 Ibid, 131. 70 Verein Bildung für Alle, ‘The Charter of Lampedusa’, http://www.bildung-fuer-alle.ch/political-program- charter-lampedusa, accessed 22 June 2015. Fig. 10: Refugee poster, Lampedusa Town, Photo: Tony Kushner