Shipwreck at the Threshold of Europe, Lesvos, Aegean Sea
‘Shipwreck at the Threshold of Europe’ is an investigation into the deadliest incident within 2015’s ‘long summer of migration’, when more than a million refugees and migrants tried to reach EU shores by sea. On 28 October 2015, a migrant boat heading from Western Turkey to the Greek island of Lesvos sank in EU territorial water, resulting in the deaths of 43 passengers.
Forensic Architecture (FA) is a research agency based at the University of London, investigating human rights violations including violence committed by states, police, military, and corporations. FA employs ground-breaking techniques in spatial and architectural analysis, open-source research, digital modelling and immersive technologies. By applying these techniques, they conduct counter-investigations that aim to get to the heart of what happened, what couldn’t have happened, and who is responsible: an intriguing journalistic-activist-technological quest for the truth. The agency works with institutions across civil society and its findings are presented in courtrooms, international media, parliamentary investigations, and can be seen in exhibitions worldwide.
The incident in the Aegean Sea was widely reported in the international media as a competent rescue operation conducted by the EU border agency and Greek coastguard. However, Forensic Architecture’s analysis disputes this and suggests that the EU’s long-term policy of policing and repelling migrants along its maritime borders left those agencies, and local coastguards, underprepared and under-equipped for rescue operations. FA’s findings open up opportunities for civil society groups to demand accountability for the lives lost on the 28th of October 2015.
