ABSTRACT
One of the two inhabited islands of the Pelagian archipelago, Lampedusa is located at a point in the Strait of Sicily that is closer to Africa than to Sicily itself. This chapter explores alternative representations of Lampedusa and Linosa provided by a small number of self-consciously 'oppositional' audiovisual texts - specifically, the feature film Terraferma, directed by Emanuele Crialese; two documentary projects, comparse by Antonio Tibaldi and Soltanto il mare by Dagmawi Yimer, Fabrizio Barraco and Giulio Cederna; and a video essay, Sudeuropa by Swiss video artists Raphael Cuomo and Maria Ionio. When viewed alongside each other, Terraferma, comparse, Sudeuropa and Soltanto il mare offer a fascinating dialogical construction of contemporary circumstances at Europe's southernmost border, a location traversed by multiple and competing mobilities. One of the novelties presented by Terraferma is its construction of the competing forms of human mobility and immobility that characterize contemporary life on the islands, affecting islanders, tourists and irregular migrants.
