Borders, perspectives and fragments. Caravaggio, Leogrande, Giannari and Kourkouta

Abstract

The essay establishes a dialogue between Alessandro Leogrande’s reading of Caravaggio’s painting The Martyrdom of St. Matthew (La frontiera, 2015) and Des spectres hantent l’Europe (2016), a documentary video shot by Niki Giannari and Maria Kourkouta in the Idomeni refugees camp. Why are images used? How can we react in front of the pain of others? What is the value of testimony? Drawing on suggestions that range from philosophy to anthropology (Merleau-Ponty, Didi-Huberman, Viveiros de Castro) the essay investigates how these two works allow us to experience another point of view. Leogrande, Giannari and Kourkouta perform a poetic operation that achieves very convincing results. On one hand Leogrande dwells on the presence of Caravaggio’s self-portrait body inside the painting; on the other, Giannari and Kourkouta’s authorial choices (the use of long shots, of images that becomes fragments saved from the History, the use of images that arise from past and future) produce a particularly effective shifting of perspective.

Keywords

• migration
• border
• point of view
• perspectivism