Since 1993, UNITED for Intercultural Action, a network of hundreds of anti-racist organisations across Europe, has been compiling a list of refugees and migrants who have lost their lives en route to the continent. As of June 2020, the list included information on 40,555 reported deaths. The total death toll is certainly much higher, as many people are neither found nor registered. Scrolling through the many pages of the list, one cannot ignore the fact that only a very small number of the deceased are mentioned by name, leaving the vast majority without identifying details.
European jurisdiction establishes a clear distinction between criminal, natural and accidental deaths, which determines how the bodies are subsequently commemorated and buried. Because the many thousands of deaths that occur on Europe’s doorstep defy these taxonomies, forensic procedures consisting of collecting medical and biological data from the corpses are not performed in most cases. This absence of information prevents any possibility of future identification of the victims. At the bottom of the sea, on the coasts and inland, a mass of decomposed bodies tells the story of a collective whose ghost hovers over European territory.
To restore dignity to these people, Arkadi Zaides and his team delve into forensic practice in each city the project passes through, building a new virtual repository documenting the remains of those whose deaths are still largely unknown.
This growing archive, this map, this invisible landscape stretches in all directions across space and time, connecting the mythologies, histories, geographies and anatomies of those granted entry to NECROPOLIS.Freedom of movement must be restored to the bodies admitted to Europe as corpses.And even if there is no longer any body in the City of the Dead that can dance, it is that no-body, that body of bodies – the body of NECROPOLIS – that Zaides intends to bring back to life.