Le tracce che restano. Un viaggio geografico tra le barche spiaggiate della migrazione

Abstract

This essay examines the Central Mediterranean as a historical-political and relational space, interrogating migration through the critical geographies of oceanic thought. Drawing on the concept of trace, the focus shifts from the migrant’s body to the materialities produced by migratory movements, with particular attention to boats stranded along the southern coast of Sicily. Through wet ontologies and the resulting non-linear conception of time, the article explores the unsettling character of these residual presences, which interrupt the spatial and temporal continuity of the coastal landscape. Suspended between sea and land, between use and abandonment, the boats act as material dispositifs that expose visible liminal social and environmental landscapes produced by contemporary regimes of mobility. In this sense, the examples discussed portray the southern coast of Sicily as a more-than-wet space in which the Mediterranean emerges as an uncanny landscape marked by the spectrality of migration.