At dawn on 3 October 2013, an old fishing boat with over 500 Eritrean refugees on board wrecks off the island of Lampedusa. The bodies of 368 people are recovered. For the first time, the bodies of the shipwrecked are visible to the world. It is an event that changes the perception of shipwrecks, until then only told through the words of the survivors. An event that triggers an enormous emotional reaction in world public opinion. Since 3 October 2013, there have been over twenty-six thousand deaths, drowned in the Mediterranean Sea in a desperate attempt to reach Europe.

The exhibition

Ten years after the Lampedusa shipwreck, the exhibition brings together some objects belonging to the migrants and unpublished portraits of the survivors and relatives of the victims, but also video and audio documentation and testimonies. Through sunglasses, watches, cell phones and photos taken by photographer Karim El Maktafi, the exhibition recalls the first great tragedy in the Mediterranean, when 368 women, men and children lost their lives while trying to reach Europe from Eritrea.

The exhibition will be held at the Shoah Memorial in Milan. The Shoah Memorial stands in the area below the platform level of Milan’s Central Station, where prisoners leaving the San Vittore prisons for the Nazi concentration camps in Poland were loaded onto cattle wagons.