But the Sea Kept Turning Blank Pages Looking for History

Klitsa Antoniou’s project “but the sea kept turning blank pages looking for history”, the title of which is a paraphrase of a line in Derek Walcott’s “The Sea is History” reflects on “biopolitical power”, the migratory experience of the individual and the destructive and destabilizing force of this experience. The installation consists of a group of metal see-through containers (fish traps), inside of which a pile of clothes seem to be trapped, forming suspended layers; these give the impression that they have been floating in salty waters for a while. There are several implicit performative aspects about the installation as the artist collected these clothes from refugees and migrants living in Cyprus and dipped them in the Mediterranean sea for a week. Klitsa Antoniou writes about her work:

“Although displacement and dislocation in the past years, has been a recurring subject matter in my work, in the project “but the sea kept turning blank pages looking for history”, I allowed the full resonance of this theme to engage and eventually raise a number of inquiries relating to the ways Ι as an artist could approach the tension between the aporetic visibility or invisibility of migration and the fluid or mobile zones of crisis. My focus in this work lies in the politics of appearance, in terms of tracing a geography/space where migrants are rendered principally invisible. It is about the people who are desperately trying to get into a safer, more promising land and are visually erased (both their lives and deaths). What we are left with is a ‘capsular’ living, a territorial ecosystem, a life contained in a hermetically sealed space: boats, containers and detention camps. For Giorgio Agamben the camp, and its contemporary “metamorphoses”, constitutes “the fourth, inseparable element that has now added itself to – and so broken – the old trinity composed of the state, the nation (birth), and land.” Yet, this absence of the subject in my work, also creates a specific ‘spectrality’ which seems to invite or call upon the faceless other. Drawing on Jacque Derrida, it envisions a potential exchange and solidarity with the absent migrant, a new politics comprising in “a being-with specters.”