Seite - 89 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Band 2/2016

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Tony Kushner | Lampedusa and the Migrant Crisis 89 mobile phones and phone cards reflect their crucial role for modern migrants in kee- ping in touch with home and also attempts to develop new networks beyond (and more recently for locations through GPS in ‘smart’ phones). Only cassette players, cassettes and VHS videos reflect a now redundant technology in the West. There are bits of navigational aids and ship’s equipment which show the simple nature of the vessels undertaking such dangerous journeys across the unpre- dictable Mediterranean and what has become the symbol of these epic journeys – the lifejacket and the lifebelt (the useles- sness of many reflecting the unscrupulous nature of the smugglers and the reality of market forces). Close to the entrance is a mobile of shoes – trainers and everyday footwear emphasising the ordinariness of those who once walked in them.108 Annalisa of the collective emphasises that ‘Each object is uploaded with energy of the past. They tell many different stories but also one simple story’.109 Yet her fellow collective member, Giacomo, warns that ‘People pay almost too much attention to them. They talk about the object instead of listening to it. Emotion is important but so is reflection and understanding’.110 They have resisted overly professionalising for this reason, rejecting the idea of a catalogue and cataloguing: ‘when archivists started putting them in plastic bags and numbering them, the objects seemed like corpses’.111 Similar objects adorn Paladino’s memorial – shoes and pots, for example, roughly sculptured. Inevitably they lack the immediate power of the original items in Porto M to evoke a human connection but nonetheless they query his monolith, if only visible close up. What is absent in Porto M and, as outlined earlier, this is a self-consciously so, is any object or document that can be connected to a particular person – there are no letters, diaries, official paperwork and especially photographs on display. For the organisers, this is out of respect and to preserve the dignity of those who cannot give permission for the items to be put in the public sphere.112 It is not known for example, who are in the surviving photographs. In addition, the legal documents might conceivably put survivors of the boats at risk in asylum claims. In thin- 108 Ibid. 109 Nightingale, 2015, ‘Lovely Lampedusa’ 110 Ibid. 111 Giacomo, in Nightingale, 2015, ‘Lovely Lampedusa’. 112 Interview with the author, 6 August 2015. Fig. 21: Tourist Information Centre, Lampedusa Town, Photo: Tony Kushner