Haunting Europe: Bodies, Borders, and the Arts of Commemoration

In the last decade, more than 70,000 people have died while attempting to cross an international border. Half of these deaths occurred in the Mediterranean, the world’s deadliest border zone. In response to the alarming number of border deaths, artists and activists have staged various interventions aimed at publicly commemorating the dead while calling attention to the structural violence of militarized borders and racialized membership. This article examines three such interventions in Europe, focusing on the Berlin-based Center for Political Beauty’s The Dead are Coming campaign, as well as Asmat, a short film by Ethiopian-Italian director Dagmawi Yimer, and Turkish visual artist Banu Cennetoğlu’s The List. It argues that acts of mourning and memorialization can bolster claims for more inclusive forms of citizenship and political community by destabilizing ethnocentric and territorially bounded conceptions of membership, identity, and solidarity.