A Knot Fit to Be Untied: A Collective Contrarian ‘We’ in Today’s Mediterranean

This essay analyses two short documentaries, both produced in 2014 (just one year before the publication of Erri De Luca’s La parola contraria), which focus on Lampedusa and its surrounding waters: the documentary Liquid Traces: The Left-to-Die Boat Case, directed by the geographers Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani, and LampeduSani, a TV film born out of the collaboration between the Italian writer Erri De Luca and the Sicilian director Costanza Quatriglio. The two movies will be considered as forms of contrarian speech (‘parola contraria’). The essay shows the challenges faced whenever we are engaged in creating a collective contrarian ‘we’.