Page - 83 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Tony Kushner | Lampedusa and the Migrant Crisis 83 In Lampedusa, the situation by 2015 was different – the island was still of crucial impor- tance in policing migration, but it had also become largely invisible in terms of the everyday life of the island. Lampedusa was certainly not ‘history’ in this respect – around the time of my visit there, and to the port of Catania in Sicily where I stayed before and after, there were migrant disasters where the dead, dying and survivors were brought to both places. It was still very different to several years earlier when the drowned bodies were brought to the beaches and thousands of migrants were sleeping in Lampedusa’s streets. Moreover, Lampedusa was no longer so prominent in the news. It seemed that with attention focused elsewhere,99 this was a good time to visit and observe. In terms of preparation, I had one or two contacts with local activists given to me by Ales- sandro Triulzi, but had a sense of the island only through official reports, autobiographical writing, documentaries, testimonies, and fictionalised versions of the migrant crisis there in film and theatre. Whilst this is perhaps not good textbook ethnographical practice, I had to some extent deliberately under-prepared a fraction in order to discover afresh how the migrant crisis was impacting on the topography of the island without too much fami- liarity. The island is small enough to stumble around, finding things – or not. What surprised me most was that there were no migrants in the town of Lampedusa at all – it confirmed the latest stage in the ‘Lampedusa play’ in which they are all totally confined to the detention centre and therefore away from the tourist gaze. The deten- tion centre itself is not signposted and when I eventually found it above and away from the town, I was greeted by an Italian soldier who pointed a gun at me when I attempted to take photo- graphs. Until the summer of 2015, the pro-migrant campaigners in the island had free access to the detention centre and could provide basic goods and, more importantly, moral support and advice. When I visited, that possibility had been removed. Britain also has detention centres for asylum seekers and they are also largely ‘hidden’: Haslar is one of the 99 Whilst this is a crude indicator, a search of the Nexis international news database gives 1055 ‘hits’ for Lampedusa in July 2014 and a fall of roughly 35 percent to 647 a year later. Fig. 15: Tourist advertisement cards, Montage: Tony Kushner