Deathscapes

Alan Kurdi - The Sea Crossing 1 - parallax 1

Deathscapes

The sea crossing

Once in Turkey, the Kurdi family travelled from Izmer and then on to Bodrum where they boarded a five-meter-long rubber boat heading towards the Greek island of Kos. This 3-4 mile journey was supposed to take only 30 minutes. (Channel 4 News, 2015).

In an interview with Radio Rozana, a Paris-based radio station, Mr Kurdi (aged 40), Alan’s father, reported that he had paid 4000 euros to the two smugglers, one Turkish and another Syrian, to get them to the boat, moored one hour away from where they were living. Mr Kurdi told another reporter from the Guardian (Smith, 2015) that one smuggler took him and his family to the boat whilst the other was supposed to safely steer them across the closest point between Bodrum, in Turkey, to Kos, in Greece.

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A shipwreck of a refugee boat. Picture of artwork by El Hadji SY
A shipwreck of a refugee boat. Artist: Guillermo Galindo. Photo courtesy of J. Jacoby.

[imagecaption]A shipwreck of European-bound refugee boat. Artist: Guillermo Galindo. Taken from installation, Fluchtzieleuropahavarieschallkörper (2017). documenta 14, documenta Halle, Kassel . Website: http://www.documenta14.de/en/artists/13506/guillermo-galindo . Photo courtesy of J. Jacoby.[/imagecaption]


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This research was primarily supported under the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme from 2016-2020.

Partial funding was received from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s Partnership Development Grants scheme in 2016-2017.

The views expressed herein are those of the named authors and are not necessarily those of the funders.

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