Text, Narrated sound:
‘We came here over 5.33 million years ago, through the Strait of Gibraltar, from the Atlantic Ocean. It was easy and slow. The robust, super saline Atlantic water and the calm, Mediterranean sea make up one beautifully navigable body, one ocean. Back then, the currents guided us eastwards along the north coast of Africa, by the strait of Sicily, through a channel of 145km wide and 1.8 km deep, connecting the Eastern and Western Mediterranean basins.
It was summer, and the fresh, fast flux of water was powerful. Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and then further eastwards, the currents carried us with less and less strength— even though we could still feel them on our bodies by the Sicilian channel. After that point, a real sense of quietness and stillness pervaded us. We loved those waters. Was this our new home? Some of us are still here today, in the largest enclosed sea on Earth.
Day by day, we’d wander around, finding fish and krill, singing to measure the distances and finding others. We had often been in similar waters to breed, fast and give birth. After some time though, we started feeling very unsettled.
Some days it looked like our tail fin moved through as if water was denser, colder. We were wondering what was it? It struck us that, even though for some of us the light and the algae would feel the same on the skin, and water would hold our flesh between the surface and the seabed in the usual way, something felt so unfamiliar and rather sinister and intense at the same time.
Moving through this feeling, we were migrating towards east. In 2022 we reached the north east point of the Mediterranean Sea, the Dardanelles Strait in Turkey, passing by a vast netted structure: a 2.7km long floating barrier, located between the Aegean islands and the coast of Turkey, blocking migrants from reaching the Greek islands. Dazed by the barrier's intermittent flashing lights, we tried to find our way-out swimming away from the Greece sea barrier.
On our way south, we reached the Eastern Mediterranean Sea where our ancestors used to say that the world’s deepest oceanic crust lies - about 340 million years old.
There, we were faced with an impenetrable underwater barrier crossing the sea of Israel and Palestine, about 200m into the sea, 50m wide and a dark gravel layer blocking the surface by the coast of the Gaza strip.
A group of humans was floating and swimming, just by the sea barrier, allowing us to see that these waters are where bodies from both sides of the barrier meet. Water cradles their experiences, stories, personal and collective narratives, sunken at sea.
It holds all of these within, like an atavic memory throughout eras; flowing through time, it fills in the spaces on either sides of a barrier, wrapping and touching seemingly distant bodies on both sides, gathering their presence and their stories, and then spreading them outwards again, towards the other shores, onto other bodies.
A sudden alarm created by a system of underwater sensors, set to detect and warn of attempts to enter Israel from the Gaza Strip, started diffusing high pitch sounds, firmly pushing us away further towards the South.
Swept away, we swam through the Central Mediterranean route, between Libya and Sicily, all of the sudden that weight unfolded on us once again. We were not able to see or sense the world around us in the same way anymore.
All we could perceive was the distant ghost of sounds and human voices wrapping up around us, tighter and tighter, from different directions and times.
There, we realised that this weight we felt was not only time, density, or salinity: it was as well the colour.
The Mediterranean was changing, turning its kaleidoscope-like greys and reds into an indistinguishable colour and we were witnesses to that change. The non-colour, combining
and absorbing all the shades, was being taken by the sea during the migrants' borders crossings, for over 300 years to this point. It was all the tones of identities together, cultures, geological soils, geographic regions, historical phases, languages, religions, micro-climates, winds, crops, bodies.
That weight we felt that intensity, was those bodies dissolved, the boats destroyed, the stories and memories sunk in water. Those sounds and voices we kept hearing from that moment on, were the proof of those events, still held in the fluid bodies of water we were travelling through, populating our path and the cold currents.’
