[extracts & images below ︎︎︎]

Geographical meeting point between countries and continents, the Mediterranean Sea is a world within itself. An expanse of life and water whose use and narrations move far beyond our time, defining multiple and diverse modes of experiencing and understanding shared environments. Simultaneously, within the contemporary capitalist reality, economically-driven forces impose representations and uses of its surfaces that arbitrarily aid a meticulously designed management of bodies, capital, and resources. As a result, the contemporary understanding of the Mediterranean Sea is split between its aestheticised representations and the hollow atrocities that characterise the diverse meanings its waters assume.
     
Entangled within these stratified networks of power and struggle, of aestheticised narrations and depoliticised representations, Mare Incognitum explores the narratives that gravitate Mediterranean geographical spaces. Moving along mappings and narrations as through arbitrary abstractions of space and political territorial rights, the research delves deep into the networks of agents that reverberate under the Mediterranean surface, exposing and inquiring whole concatenations of geopolitical and biopolitical infrastructures.

An exploration led by a precise question, one often rather not posed, but still necessary: how and on which bases, is one allowed the right to be human? Arbitrarily defined as productive or unproductive, bodies emerge here fully subdued within the mesh of hegemonic constructs. Either allowed the freedoms of their arbitrary privilege, or struggling within states of suspended life, Mare Incognitum underlines the very underworlds that build up these unequal settings.

Cautiously embraced as reality’s anti-monument, the Mediterranean Sea is employed, page after page, as an incommensurable entity that allows a painful exploration of the inequalities that characterise the contemporary political management of bodies and resources.


Language: English
200mm x 141mm.
118 pages. Risoprint & Digital
printing. Color & B/W.
30 copies.
Printed at Ultravivid Press, Eindhoven, Early 2021.

(printed a/o digital copies available via request)

Graduation thesis, the Critical Inquiry Lab, Design Academy Eindhoven, June 2021.

                       

Extracts:

(34-37)

Under the hegemonic play through which we witness today’s Mediterranean realities, the Capitalist System crafts feasible and functional realities.
As brilliantly posed by the Wu-Ming Collective, these ‘reality craftings’ are mainly narrative operations able to smoothly move realities built on abstract planes to their translation in interpretations – interpretation that turn into actions onto the concrete planeof existence.¹⁶ In short, these narrations are mainly semiotic operations:

“Infusing fear of the gods is merely a semiotic operation, as much as it is a theological operation the act of having people believe in the existence of abstract entities such as financial capital. Nowadays, money is merely an energy stream, a bunch of electrons moving from point A to point B – something really close to conception of the Holy Spirit, as investments might be a Pentecost.” ¹⁷

Meaning that – through a well constructed narration of reality – economy, money, and investments are embodied as a faith: abstract entities able to produce impacts on the concrete grounds of Reality. Hence, to have the construct (abstraction) working, it is necessary to have it applied on solid grounds (concreteness). And therefore, to have it functioning on a global scale implies accepting the ‘downsides’ (meaning acts of violence and oppression) – which are to be seen as bearable necessities. This process is indeed mainly settled within the evolution that the Surplus Value Dynamic underwent.
The theory of the surplus value has indeed developed from its being goods- money-goods (and in a second moment money- goods-money) into a state of Pure Capitalism, where the axiom rules as money-money.

Within this passage, the dynamic of production embraces the human dimension only as necessary for the generation of surplus value: humans are enforced as pure humus for the growth of the capital, meaning that – within the paradigm – it is the standard of productivity that defines the actual value of a being (by defining in the first place which kind of productions are to be recognised as productive, and therefore valuable).
In short, the mechanics upon which capitalism feeds eventually translate certain realities into narratives that suit the required beliefs – whilst certain categories of humans are turned into ‘waste’, as their cultural realities are absorbed (or rather annihilated). Hence, narrations also work as a necessary anaesthetic to maintain the gears that keep realities (capitalist’s) alive – meaning erected in order to also hide a/o justify a series of oppressive and otherwise unacceptable mechanics.

These processes of (re)constructions of realities (common understandings) – such as the ones built around the Mediterranean Sea – work because of a seemingly ancient, but nevertheless extremely effective device. It consists in the production of a myth, or rather, it consists in the shaping of a narration that is set to somehow define the interpretation of Reality itself. Such narratives enable to assemble and re-assemble given scenarios to fit the given times – with the aim to produce concrete and factual repercussions onto Reality.
The system works because it is able to tackle and bend abstract constructs into concrete operations. But where does this ability derive from?
On the one hand it works because capitalism subsumes and feeds upon previously existing narratives – it being able to reshape and twist them for its purposes. And, on the other hand, from its autopoiesis: its capability, as a system, to reproduce and maintain itself through the creation of its own components (narratives), and the adaptation of these ones when interacting with the third parties (factualities) they encounter.

Acknowledging the dynamics upon which reality thrives, or dies, implies the understanding that politics play a major role in aiding the mechanics (narratives and relative abstract-to-concrete transposition) through which these exist. The social and political power to which living and nonliving are exposed¹⁸ comes to its peak under several forms of violence, one extreme of which
is the denial of realities: a narrative and political force for which some bodies are to remain in states of lingering between life and death, a form of subjugation to power and capital.

[...]

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(76-80)

   

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking peo- ple’s hats off –then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.” ⁵⁶

Harold Beaver’s commentary of Moby Dick⁵⁷ sets a very neat reading of Melville’s masterpiece: three different times Melville opens Moby Dick’s first chapter (Loomings), and each and everyone of these openings has a profound meaning that incipits the book once more, as indeed the novel has three different narratives layers within a single narration. The above-mentioned extract belongs to the very first of these three openings – the famous “Call me Ishmael...” – which strikes directly to death and self-reflection – as it has to be echoed in the myth of Narcissus drowned:

“[...] and still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who be- cause he could not grasp the tormenting image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But the same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life.”⁵⁸

As it was in the myth of Narcissus, this self- contemplation, that is of fascinated self-exploration of intellect by intellect, reality by reality, is the key reference – within Melville’s Moby Dick – to the sterile, unturned process of modern man. Ishmael, across the narration, exiles from its role of narrator to be witness of something bigger: within the myth, all the components become themselves mirror images of ‘men’ – Captain Ahab, the Whale, and all the passages, are merely narrations of modernity’s endeavours and its relative human struggles.
In the contemporary, age of multiple entangled and overlapping narratives, the Sea still allows these narrations, enabling us to mirror ourselves in it – once going deeper than those very narrative layers that we ourselves somehow posed upon it.

As an archive of struggles, frictions, and oppressions – haunted by the empty rhetorics
of the mainstream, and by its hypocrisy – the Mediterranean Sea needs now to be this mirror, anti-monument to those very narratives and beliefs that – in order to shield itself – society applied onto it. A lonely niche allowing glimpses of those hidden facets of global north’s endeavours; a window on that conceptual shift that moves the hypocrisy
that on land generates, into the tragedy that sea witnesses. As a Counter-Site towards framed reality constructs, the Sea becomes a monolith for us to behold, contest, and underline an ‘horror’⁵⁹ we wouldn’t otherwise dare to face. It is again, as it was for literature, a locus able to aid us in our self- contemplation that, once more, should be of self- exploration, of intellect by intellect, reality by reality.

Disturbing, incommensurable, intense, and contradictory, the Sea exists therefore as a world within a world, a reality, within realities – mirroring, and yet unsettling that that it mirrors: a waste land.60 Germinating multiple and opposite layers of meaning, it is a space of illusion that exposes every real space. And, due to this absolute difference
it assumes when compared to that of which it narrates, the Mediterranean almost lies outside of reality, yet having precise location within it. And as such, it is its Anti-Monument.

But, once the veil is disclosed, there is no more opacity, no more space for black transparencies.⁶¹ Capital’s pollution (narrative and political) created its own counter portrait: one we can access in order to truly look at ourselves, and our guilt, as it discreetly moves it from us, so that we can see where, as accomplices, we truly stand.

[...]

(printed a/o digital copies available via request)

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16:

De Lorenzis, T. and Wu Ming (Writers collective). Giap! Tre Anni Di Narrazioni e Movimenti. Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 2003

17:

De Lorenzis, T. and Wu Ming. Giap! Tre Anni Di Narrazioni e Movimenti. (2003) (171)

18:

Mbembe, A. Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

Necropower: the enforcement of necropolitics through use of social and political power to dictate how some people may live and how some must die.

56:

Melville, H. Moby Dick, or, The Whale; London: Penguin Books, 1972 (93).

57:

Harold Beaver’s Commentary to Penguin’s 1972 Moby Dick, or, The Whale⁵⁶

58:

Harold Beaver’s Commentary within Melville, Moby Dick, or, The Whale; 1972 (701)⁵⁶

59:

Cox, C.B. T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land : A Casebook. Nashville: Aurora Publishers, 1970.

The horror: both as the unbearable truth, as in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) – himself quoting Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899)– as in Eliot’s The Waste Land (1925) where he as well embraces this image of the horror to speak of the nervous exhaustion, the mental disintegration, the exaggerated self- consciousness, the boredom, the pathetic gropings after the fragments of a shattered faith – as symptoms of the psychic disease which ravaged Europe.

60:  

Eliot, T. S. The Hollow Man. London: Faber & Faber, 2009 (reprinted – 1925).

61:  

Metahaven, Black Transparency - the right to know in the age of mass surveillance. London: Sternberg Press, 

2011.