Page - 84 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

84 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Tony Kushner | Lampedusa and the Migrant Crisis largest and is fifteen miles from my home in Hampshire. The case of Lampedusa, however, was more alarming – first, because it is now utterly inaccessible to visitors and second because of the immediacy of the migrant journeys and the processing it represents. It was not simply the pointing of a gun directly at me that made this ‘visit’ to the detention centre alienating and frankly frightening. There was a glimpse of a group of migrants close to the gates of the deten- tion centre but this was the only one in the whole of my visit to Lampedusa. Moreover, none of the sites most obviously connected to the migrant crisis is especially visible and/or accessible as will become apparent. And yet everywhere the enormity of what happened/is continuing to happen is there in the streets – whether in pro-asylum graffiti, murals and posters. I was, howe- ver, looking for such reminders of what has happened and continues to happen to migrants there. Whether the ‘average’ holidaymaker to Lampedusa (most are Italian) is aware or wants to be aware is another matter – a theme explored explicitly in Crialese’s Terraferma. The dominant narrative presented to the visitor consists of food, beaches, fishing trips and turtles. A sense of difference and otherness was something that I was very aware of in my visit, and Lampedusa continues to haunt me (hence this article as a process of coming to terms with it). First, the island has a strange landscape beyond its beaches and small towns. In effect, the land was accidentally made into a near-desert through deliberate deforestization in the mid- nineteenth century. Attempts are being made to reintroduce more vegetation and wildlife but it remains largely and strikingly barren. On one level it reflects a man made ecological disaster of sheer destruction and extermination. On another, it has a unique beauty of its own. In terms of its architecture, there are only fragments of its early pre-history and history Fig. 16: Pots and pans, Porto M, Photo: Tony Kushner