Anthony Haughey: Prospect

Title:

Prospect

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Medium:

Two channel video installation, mini-DV HD transferred to DVD, audio/video

Artist Statement:

This video installation explores illegal immigration from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe. Nearly 6,000 immigrants have died on the frontiers of Europe since 1988. Among them 1,883 have been lost at sea in the Sicilian Channel between Libya, Tunisia, Malta and Italy. Migrants pay unscrupulous smugglers 1,500-2000 euro to travel from North Africa. The journey can take more than five days in dangerously overloaded wooden fishing boats inadequate for the task.

Prospect consists of two complimentary channels of video. A metaphoric journey filmed in the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Malta, and the in-between spaces of a former school; a refugee centre in Malta, and a small room on the North Circular Road in Dublin, where the two protagonists, Sadik and Warsame have found temporary accommodation.

Warsame narrates his perilous journey from Somalia to Europe, an epic journey that can often take more than three years. This firsthand account is a powerful testimony of forced migration across some of the most inhospitable terrain in the world.

The vantage point of the camera places the viewer in the position of sub-Saharan migrants travelling through endless miles of shifting sands and floating on turbulent waves in the sea.

There is a tension between the two video works. The anonymous and threatening force of nature, a landscape of endless sand dunes and rolling seas is juxtaposed with the intimate lives and temporal homes of the two protagonists. Warsame’s articulate critical reflection of both his personal journey and the predicament of similar people caught in the stasis of European transnational migration policy.