Sea

That morning, while we were painting and sharing, I remember the young man, he was in his twenties. He told me how scary the water of the Mediterranean Sea was at times. When asked if he could remember the moment when he felt safer, Salim without a touch of hesitation in his voice said: “Yes, I can remember very well. It is the moment when we left the Libyan territorial water and got into the international sea”.

We looked at each other for a moment and when asked how he could see the difference, Salim ‘s answer was implacable: “The Libyan Sea was dark but as soon as the water changed colour, a kind of light blue, I knew we had reached the international sea, we were safe, and it was not a dream, I was safe”.

Xavier Verhoest, Immigrant center, Sicily, October 2017

“Far from the immensities of sea and land, merely through memory, we can recapture, by means of meditation, the resonances of this contemplation of grandeur. But is this really memory? Isn’t imagination alone able to enlarge indefinitely the images of immensity? In point of face, daydreaming, from the very first second, is an entirely constituted state. We do not see it start, and yet it always starts the same way, that is, it flees the object nearby and right away it is far off, elsewhere, in the space of elsewhere.”

Gaston Bachelard