NO Visa will address the fatal crossings of the Mozambique Channel and the Mediterranean Sea by Comorian nationals who are trying to reach either Mayotte or Marseille (also called the “capital” of the Comoro islands or the “the largest Comorian city” since at least 10% of its population are of Comorian origin).
No Visa will be based on the narratives produced by survivors and families who lost members at sea that I gathered in the Comorian islands of Ngazidja/Grande Comore and Nzuani/Anjouan, Maoré/Mayotte and Marseille. Indeed, Comorian nationals either travel/migrate for family, health care, social, asylum seeking or economic reasons to Mayotte by crossing the narrow 70 kilometers inlet between Anjouan and Mayotte, and many attempt to reach Marseille by flying to either Northern or Western Africa before crossing the Mediterranean. NO Visa will trace the transformation of these maritime spaces –originally places of intellectual, cultural, religious and commercial exchanges– into mass graves.
The libretto that I will author will be set to music by Eliane Aberdam to produce our joint operatic undertaking. For Aberdam, “operatorio” refers to a musical work that combines the lyricism and succession of scenes of an opera (arias, recitatives, interludes) and the gravitas and restraint of an oratorio. The “operatorio” will include multimedia components, among them photographs that I took of border patrolling in the Indian Ocean, migrant burials in the Comoros, Mayotte and Tunisia.
NO visa intends to bring awareness to a broader public of the tragic situation of Comorian travelers and exiles who lose their lives in the Mozambique Channel and in the Mediterranean Sea. This work is political, not because it represents the interests of one party or another, but because it addresses the philosophical essence of politics: the very nature of life, death and freedom – in this case, the deaths of tens of thousands of human beings in both maritime spaces as a consequence of the implementation of deterrent immigration policies that do not deter people from migrating but instead force them to follow perilous journeys where they encounter discrimination, harassment, enslavement, torture and death.