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64 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Tony Kushner | Lampedusa and the Migrant Crisis Moorehead described Lampedusa in the first years of the twenty first century: ‘Spring and summer, on the long calm days, it is where the refugees arrive almost daily in their battered and crumbling boats, frightened, unsure, expectant.’ More clinically, she added that ‘Experts in asylum matters who study the flows of refugees and their journeys to the north, call it the blue route after the waters of the Mediterranean, and it has become a lucrative source of the estimated $5 to $7 billion revenue from the world’s traffic in smuggled people’.15 Until the trage- dies of 2015 which focused on different desperate journeys across the Aegean Sea from Turkey to various Greek islands, no place came to symbolise more the intense human tragedy and drama of modern migration, evoking sentiments of pity, shame and fear in equal measures. Politicians, NGOs, artists and the media, as well as and the islanders and migrants themsel- ves, have confronted and represented the recent and ongoing story of Lampedusa. In 2016, for example, British Guyunese artist, Jason deCaires Taylor, created his work Raft of Lampedusa on the seabed off the coast of Lanzarote. According to Taylor, his work was ‘not intended as a tribute or memorial to the many lives lost but as a stark reminder of the collective responsibility of our new global community’. In what is part of the world’s first underwater museum, thirteen passengers drift towards an unknown future on a flimsy inflatable boat.16 The sculptures are located 3000 nautical miles from and in a different ocean to Lampedusa. Furthermore, its main figure at the bow is cast from Abdel Kader who as a thirteen year old was smuggled from the troubled Western Sahara to Lanzarote at the turn of the twenty first century. But the precise geography referenced in the title of Taylor’s work (paying homage to Gericault’s 1818 painting The Raft of the Medusa) reflects the Italian island’s notoriety with regard to the modern migra- tion crisis.17 As with Palestine and ‘illegal’ immigration, questions of performativity have been central in establishing meaning to Lampedusa. In their 2014 cultural guide for travellers to Sicily, Andrew and Suzanne Edwards contrast its major city Palermo with ‘the remains of a splendid Arab-Norman past with the less happy reflection of ‘modern-day relations with North Africa’ – that of those ‘intent on escaping the harsh realities at home’: “The most obvious demonstration of these events has been the refugee centre on the Sicil- ian island of Lampedusa, one of the nearest landfalls to Tunisia. Many have risked life and limb, often falling prey in the process to unscrupulous people – traffickers whose last priority is their victims’ safety...” 18 Also in the realm of the holiday maker, in 2015 TripAdvisor produced a list of the top ten beaches in Europe. The first three were in the Mediterranean with Rabbit Beach, Lampedusa, 15 Moorehead, Human Cargo, 51-2. 16 Susan Smillie, ‘Into the Deep’, Guardian, 3 February 2016. For an underwater tour of the work and interview with Taylor, see ‘Underwater museum offers stark reminder of refugee crisis’, PBS NewsHour, 5 February 2016, www.pbs.org, accessed 21 August 2016. It officially opened to scuba divers on 25 February 2016. 17 Smillie, ‘Into the Deep’. It could be added that the boat in Taylor’s work more resembles the dinghies connected to the journeys from Turkey to the Greek islands rather than the larger vessels which were associated with Lampedusa. Gericault’s Romanticist painting depicted the sinking of a French navy frigate and the ‘abandonment of 147 souls to a hastily built raft from which only 15 survived’. Smillie continues that ‘the painting was seen as an indictment of the French monarchy and political system’. 18 Andrew and Suzanne Edwards, Sicily: A Literary Guide for Travellers (London: I.B.Tauris, 2014), 230.