Fuocoammare and the Aesthetic Rendition of the Relational Experience of Migration

Jacques Ranciere suggests that “the core political experience of our generation may well have been to go on...a voyage, discovering for ourselves [a] recognizable foreignness, this shimmering of life” . Adorno claims "Under patient contemplation artworks begin to move". What is the relation between the dynamism Adorno identifies in aesthetic experience, and the voyaging Ranciere sees as a crucial political experience? This essay will take Gianfranco Rosi's Fuoccoamare (2016) as the occasion to explore the relationship between the dynamism of aesthetic experience and the displacements of the contemporary world. The first section will develop a strong argument for understanding art practice and aesthetic experience as intrinsically mobile and destabilizing. This dynamic understanding of aesthetics will be then linked to the artistic construction and spectatorial experience of the displacement of people in Fuoccoamare. Art becomes the place where an "open relation" between peoples, spaces and times gets productively figured. The contemporary conjuncture of the migrations of people and the dynamic of aesthetic experience are thought together.