Over the past decade, the Mediterranean Sea has emerged as the deadliest migration corridor worldwide, with thousands of documented and undocumented fatalities each year.
Mainstream Eurocentric perspectives and political discourses frequently depict this as a “refugee crisis,” placing a strong emphasis on threats to national sovereignty and security. Such framings not only perpetuate xenophobic narratives and obscure centuries-long patterns of trans-Mediterranean mobility; they also uphold a continuum of Europe’s colonial legacy. From a necropolitical and decolonial perspective, the “crisis” materializes in the manufacturing of normalized death.
This archival project confronts this “first world” gaze by not only contesting the narrative itself. We present the lived realities of Sub-Saharan migrant women who navigate these perilous routes. In gathering their personal oral histories and documenting their material “sacred memories”, the project seeks to address the contemporary gaze of migration. It underscores how the expropriation and racial hierarchies of colonial pasts now manifest in present-day border violence, underwritten by policies that frame these women’s bodies as disposable. In contrast, by centering these migrant women’s perspectives and belongings, the project reframes the Mediterranean Sea as a silent archive of both historical and ongoing violence—one in which colonial power structures endure and continue to shape contemporary migrations. Ultimately, it aims to contest the dominating politicized discourse and amplify the agency, humanity, and resilience of those most affected by Europe’s necropolitical border practices: immigrant women.
Overall, as the only open-access database on migrant deaths and disappearances, IOM has documented more than 63,000 cases worldwide.
By documenting the material objects women carry with themselves in their migratory journey, we seek to render visible those personal memories materialized in rings, shoes, bracelets, broken telephone kept by them because they are a source of courage, pride, dreams and intimate connections with their countries of origin. Rather than showing their faces, the project sought to focus on material objects that endure over time despite the many unfathomable hardships migrant women experience in their journey seeking a better future for themselves, children and families.
In this context, photography becomes a medium that bears witness to the manifestations of lived realities of migrants -to consider the material manifestations of what it means to be a migrant, or rather, to be displaced.
Amad Diallo is a researcher and translator from Equatorial Guinea and based in Tanger.
Naomi Tinga is an economic graduate student and photographer based in New York City.
Marcia Esparza, PhD is a sociologist and professor based in New York City.
Contact: esparza.hmp@gmail.com