Seite - 211 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Band 1/2015

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 1 2o15 Estela Schindel | Sea border crossing to Europe 211 boat capsized in 2009, is particularly moved when remembering the reaction of a woman he saved from drowning together with her daughter. “She kissed the crucifix I was carrying with me,” he says. “She was Muslim, but was kissing the christ.” During the crossing, identities and kinships are dissolved and born anew. Belongings and beliefs are suspended and contracts of faith challenged and eventually re-forged. Once on European territory, travellers will be screened by police and frontex personnel in order to determinate their “true” nationality and age. Individuals and families will continue their journeys through the Europe of Dublin II, entering and exiting stratified structures of civil inscription as they make their way from bare life into a recognized status of residency. The dinghy boats, the material carriers of their floating heterotopias, will have traversed processes of transformation and changed properties on their way. The vehicles of the crossing, too, accumulate successive stories of robberies, lootings, re-appropriations, damages and loss. When the trafficking started, over a decade ago, facilitator networks would steal wooden boats from Turkish fishermen in order to carry migrants illegally. The fishermen complained that they would not only lose their boats but also face the risk of being charged with trafficking themselves. Since then, they say, they started taking some mechanical part of the motor with them when leaving the port, so that their ships can’t be used in their absence. On the Greek side, refugees reaching the coast of Lesbos would be met by locals who were scrutinizing the sea with binoculars and searchlights from the coast in order to steal the boats or their engines after arrival.9 Looters would compete fiercely against each other, vaguely sheltered by a law that allows whoever finds an “ungoverned” boat to register and keep it. Like their passengers, boats seemed to be considered to float in an undetermined, lawless condition, abandoned to whoever masters them. Rumors went that “hunters” would even force refugees off a boat or just throw them into the sea while still off the coast. Terrified, the passengers wouldn’t resist but despera- tely ask where is Omonias, the square in Athens where their traffickers instructed them to go, tells the reporter Giorgios Moutafis: “They didn’t know that they were crossing the Aegean Sea; they have just heard that they are crossing a river called Aegean, which would bring them to Athens.” The lootings seem to have receded after being publicly denounced and criticized. And boats and life jackets continue to be left and piled up on Lesbos’ beaches, raising the question of what to do with them. Activists offered a possible answer with an initiative aimed at recycling the deflated and discarded dinghy boats. Run mainly by Afghan underage refugees who had worked as tailors in Iran, they would create wallets, sports bags and laptop cases with plastic and rubber from the boats, subjecting their remains to further transformations and travels, now transporting goods and money after having carried a human labor force and suggesting an unpredictable after memory of the crossings. An Afghan boy is quoted stating that those “boat bags” are “like an extension of our memory... the boats that brought us here, we are carrying on [us] now.”10 9 This and the following testimonies on the lootings are taken from the TV report Ta Korakia tis Lesvion (The Ravens of Lesbos) and were translated for me by Katerina Kalouli. The piece is available (in Greek) in: <https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNTIuEfD0ug> [accessed 2015-01-28] 10 The information can be found in: <http://traces.w2eu.net/files/2013/12/Ausstellung-Lesvos-Screen.pdf> [accessed 2015-01-28], the original internet site of the project <http://mohajer.jogspace.net> is not active anymore.