Back to the Sicilian Landing Sites: Exploring a Borderland through a Refugee Gaze

This article is based on a shared ethnographic experience centered on a trip back to a crucial landing site in Sicily. Searching for the evocative and emotional dimension of a border zone, the research follows a refugee, who is now living within the institutional reception system in Northern Italy, wandering and rediscovering the moment of his arrival three years after having been rescued. The dialogue that emerged from this experience focuses on the following aspects: the relationship between death at sea and the willingness to remember and give testimony, the security turn in the management of programmed landings, the production of the sea smuggler as a comfortable public enemy and scapegoat, and the camp as a device of segregation rather than hospitality. Through these four aspects, the article explores the critical possibilities of a refugee gaze, trying to explore the border from a different perspective from that of the state’s thought on migration.