Valentina Zagaria - “The boat in the sky”: crafting fun with Tunisian youth in a sea of repression
Lecture abstract
Between June and October 2024, I joined an artist collective in Tunis in developing a performance based on collaborative research surrounding the building of a small wooden boat. Together with around twenty young people from the seaside neighbourhood of Kram, we embarked on this project with the aim of coming together and having fun (jaw) amid an increasingly repressive context. Alongside the construction work, we started carrying out interviews with residents whose livelihoods depend on boats, who could also advise us on practicalities related to their craft or on bureaucratic matters, as well as with different inhabitants’ relationship to the sea more generally. Soon, however, we encountered administrative hurdles and security anxieties, as both the authorities and the broader community immediately associated young people and boat building with desires for harga – the unauthorised crossing of the Mediterranean to Europe. In interviews too, different people shared with us the difficulties they faced nowadays in building and registering boats, or in importing them for sports purposes: all were regulated through the prism of border enforcement, pushing them to come up with creative ways to carry out leisure activities at sea or to keep up their trades. The inequalities and injustices brought about by the European Union’s border externalisation to Tunisia were thus made tangible through the boat building and research processes. Pursuing connection through the sharing of skills and experiences, and attending to them through rehearsals and performance, allowed us to give value to different understandings, imaginaries, and narratives of youth and migration that playfully unravelled societal and political logics of control. The performance we developed involving rap, circus, and verbatim theatre thus showcased stories of crafting space for enjoyment with and at sea, proposing a defiant theory and practice of jaw.
About the lecturer
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Social Anthropology Department, University of Manchester.
Valentina Zagaria is an anthropologist of borders, migration, and social change in North Africa, currently holding a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship at the University of Manchester. Her work focuses on dignity and social death as drives of both protest and migratory movements in the Central Mediterranean. She is interested in experimenting with ways of putting ethnography and theatre in dialogue, and in collaborative methods for thinking through performance.