Bathers

2021

Multilayer mono-channel video HD

Duration: 01:58”

On 2 September 2000, an inconceivable image swept the world. That year, hundreds of small boats crossed the Strait of Gibraltar loaded with Maghrebi immigrants, many of whom ended up as stranded bodies on the Spanish coast. The image showed a lighthearted group of tourists, bathing on the beaches of Tarifa, on the sands of which the unfortunate migrants were lying lifeless. It showed two scandals in the same frame, each larger than the other. The presence of the inanimate bodies, a stark sign of our failures as a human collective, and that of the living bodies of tourists enjoying the sea, totally oblivious to the ignominy that surrounded them: another failure of the same collective.