The images diffused by the media that tell the phenomenon of the great international migrations don’t shock us anymore. Nor have they helped to sensitise us Westerners to grant others the solidarity that they are entitled to. Testimony is the advance of the populist and xenophobic right wing in Europe, including Italy. The vision of images of disembarkations and shipwrecks has become routine, even among the most sensitive of people. This is perhaps because we are betrayed by ourselves, by our central nervous system that works on the basis of new stimuli. 

That which represents something new stays imprinted in our memory. And the mechanism that stamps the recollections of our memory is emotion. The image of Aylan, the Syrian child who died on a beach on the island of Kos in Greece, remains etched in our memory because it causes emotion of indignation, mercy, condemnation. But if an experience has already been consumed and worn out, the emotional mechanism is not triggered. And therefore, something that had touched and overwhelmed us, when it is subjected to a recurrence, is released from emotionality and enters normality. And so it no longer causes outrage, but habituation. 

Invisibility still offers itself in a twofold way. On the one hand, the absence and the ruin of the images. On the other, the redundancy of the images until they are reduced to a visual background so monotonous as to be no longer noticeable. Even at the foot of the lighthouse there is no light. As Georges Didi-Huberman wrote in one of the fundamental writings on the philosophy of images "destroying and multiplying are the two ways of rendering an image invisible: with nothing and with too much."

It's the new law of not seeing.

The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, writing in the wake of the Holocaust, when people turned the other cheek while their Jewish neighbours, the "others", were being loaded on the trains of deportation, drew up an understanding of the human existence based on the recognition that we are not alone and that we become fully human only through the encounter with "the other", someone who at first glance is unknown. At this meeting we answer the call of the stranger with a "hineni", word of Biblical Hebrew which literally means "Here I am" and which indicates a complete, emotional and spiritual presence as well as physical, giving testimony to the "other". 

From these reflections arises Where is my brother? Dov’è mio fratello? and the choice to not show even one face from the millions of refugees who have come to Europe in recent years, as not to exclude anyone. Instead it was decided to reveal what unites us and not what divides us, without distinction of race, belonging to one humanity, in an attempt to break down the ideological boundary between us and them. Following two reportage projects conducted between 2015 and 2016, this sequence unites on one hand the ordinary nature of the objects and, on the other, the cold scientific nature of the identification protocols of the unnamed bodies. The first speaks to us directly of their/our life and of their/our humanity, while the second presents us with the tragedy of the anonymity of those people. On one hand, the objects move us away from the idea of an "us" counterposed to the "others". The forensic evidence of death, on the other hand, is what we are not subjected to every day. It is the side of the history of migration which we are almost never told: that of the thousands of victims buried without a name. Although we are all made of bones and biological tissues, at death we are not the same.

Our graves with names. Theirs with numbers.