Poetry and Migration. On Zurita’s “Sea of Pain”

Abstract

The artistic installation El mar del dolor by the Chilean poet Raúl Zurita establishes a controversy with the treatment given to migrants in the media, particularly with the photograph of the dead Syrian boy on the beach, taken image by Turkish reporter Nilüfer Demir in 2015 year. Zurita responds to this picture by creating a piece of humanity —a concept of Georges Didi Huberman— for the migrants who were on that boat that was shipwrecked. In their piece of humanity, the subjects invisible to photography, whose names have been forgotten or crossed out, recover their names; and, the victim no longer has a strange, unique or exotic experience, as in the photograph, but its occurrence is linked to other experiences of pain, mainly those of the author of the artistic text. In opposition to neat photography, which shows the sufferer isolated from his context, the Zuritian humanity plot makes the different forces of the conflict appear, generating spaces that are not just a set. Also, while the overexposing photograph enjoys the pose, the plot returns the movement and life to those who had been captured and kidnapped by the lens. With this, Zurita polemizes with overrepresentation, a photography as a spectacle where the spectator is a specter of what happens; and with the under-representation of those who have no right to image. The poet manages to remove the visitor from the installation of his status as a spectator and introduce it to the experience of the migrant shipwreck