Where is my brother?

The images diffused by the media that tell the phenomenon of the great international migrations don’t shock us anymore. The redundancy of these images are now 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.


From these reflections arises Where is my brother? 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, belonging to one humanity, in an attempt to break down the ideological boundary between us and them. 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. 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, 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.

© Gianni Cipriano - Tracksuit jacket and jeans left on a vessel that carried refugees across the Mediterranean Sea. 
Sicily, 2015
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Tracksuit jacket and jeans left on a vessel that carried refugees across the Mediterranean Sea. 
Sicily, 2015

© Gianni Cipriano - Children shoes left on a vessel that carried refugees across the Mediterranean Sea. 
Sicily, 2015

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Children shoes left on a vessel that carried refugees across the Mediterranean Sea. 
Sicily, 2015


© Gianni Cipriano - Child SpongeBob swim vest left on a vessel that carried refugees across the Mediterranean Sea”. Sicily, 2015
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Child SpongeBob swim vest left on a vessel that carried refugees across the Mediterranean Sea”. Sicily, 2015

© Gianni Cipriano - Bra left on a vessel that carried refugees across the Mediterranean Sea. 
Sicily, 2015
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Bra left on a vessel that carried refugees across the Mediterranean Sea. 
Sicily, 2015

© Gianni Cipriano - Woman purse left on a vessel that carried refugees across the Mediterranean Sea”. Sicily, 2015
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Woman purse left on a vessel that carried refugees across the Mediterranean Sea”. Sicily, 2015

© Gianni Cipriano - Unmarked mass grave of refugees next to a landfill”. Tunisia, 2015
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Unmarked mass grave of refugees next to a landfill”. Tunisia, 2015

© Gianni Cipriano - Femur sections of refugees deceased in shipwrecks”. Sicily, 2016
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Femur sections of refugees deceased in shipwrecks”. Sicily, 2016

© Gianni Cipriano - Freezer containing bone samples of refugees deceased in shipwrecks. 
Sicily, 2016
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Freezer containing bone samples of refugees deceased in shipwrecks. 
Sicily, 2016

© Gianni Cipriano - Box files of documents relating to the 2014 landings of refugees and shipwrecks in Sicily”. Sicily, 2016
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Box files of documents relating to the 2014 landings of refugees and shipwrecks in Sicily”. Sicily, 2016

© Gianni Cipriano - Image from the Where is my brother? photography project
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Storage cabinets for histological blocks containing blood and tissue samples of refugees deceased in shipwrecks. Sicily, 2016

© Gianni Cipriano - Histological blocks containing blood and tissue samples of refugees deceased in shipwrecks. 
Sicily, 2016
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Histological blocks containing blood and tissue samples of refugees deceased in shipwrecks. 
Sicily, 2016

© Gianni Cipriano - Anonymous refugee graves. Sicily, 2016
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Anonymous refugee graves. Sicily, 2016

© Gianni Cipriano - Grave of an unidentified refugee. 
Sicily, 2016
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Grave of an unidentified refugee. 
Sicily, 2016

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