Italo Rondinella | Shipwreck Crime

Under the auspices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and UNICEF Italia, the exhibition consists of a series of personal objects – clothes, shoes, baby bottles, life jackets and many more – belonging to the migrants. Hundreds of people who, in the hope to reach European territory, attempted to cross the short stretch of sea separating the Turkish coast from the Greek island of Lesvos. Many of them didn’t make it.

The castaway objects were photographed by the author as found on the shore, in the stretch of coast between Babakale and Ayvalık, where seaside resorts alternate with empty segments of coast. They were subsequently collected to become the corpus, together with the images (44 are the photographs and 44 the respective objects) of this exhibition, which aims at restoring dignity to the anonymous stories of the people they belonged to.