2 Cariello, Marta and Chambers, Iain, La questione mediterranea (Milan: Mondadori, 2019)Google Scholar. In this book Mediterranean historiography is reimagined as a ‘plurality of centers’, as depicted by Gramsci, Antonio in ‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question’ (1926) in Antonio Gramsci: Selections from Political Writings (1921–1926), ed. and trans. Hoare, Quintin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

3 I share this view along with the scholars Iain Michael Chambers and Marta Cariello, who made clear their political and academic standpoint also in the recent article ‘Mediterranean Blues: Archives, Repertoires and the Black Holes Of Modernity’, California Italian Studies, 10, 2 (2020), pp. 1–17.

4 See the definition of ‘polyphonic’ included in the ‘polyphonic glossary’ elaborated for this project: ‘The word comes from the term polyphony, used in music to refer to autonomous melodies intertwined … Polyphony can bring a revelation in listening: one is forced to pick out separate, simultaneous melodies and to listen for the moments of harmony and dissonance they create together, this noticing expands the attention to the different perspectives and may generate appreciation for the multiple trajectories of the singular sounds and rhythms’. Roberto Casarotto, ‘Polyphonic’, in Migrant Bodies-Moving Borders, online publication, p. 55, www.migrantbodies.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/MBMB_compressed.pdf, accessed 20 December 2020.

5 I borrow the expression coined by Paola Zaccaria. ‘Trans-MediterrAtlantic’ is a neologism that brings together the concepts of ‘trans-Mediterranean’ and ‘transatlantic’. See Zaccaria, Paola, ‘A Breach in the Wall: Artivist No-Border Atlases of Mobility’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 26, 1 (2017), pp. 37–53Google Scholar.

6 Nancy, Jean L., Listening (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

7 Ibid., p. 31.

8 Ibid. For Nancy, ‘the visual is on the side of an imaginary capture’, ‘while the sonorous is on the side of the symbolic referral/renvoi … In still other words, the visual is tendentially mimetic, and the sonorous tendentially methexic (that is, having to do with participation, sharing, contagion)’. Nancy, p. 10.

9 Ibid., p. 43.

10 For a critical understanding of ‘soundscapes’ at the intersection of Mediterranean studies and post-colonial theory see the work of Iain Chambers, ‘Sounds from the South’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 22, 2–5 (2011), pp. 300–12; Chambers, Mediterraneo Blues (Naples: Tamu, 2020); Leandro Pisano, Nuove geografie del suono (Rome: Meltemi, 2017).

11 For the concept of ‘earwitness’ see R. Murray Schafer The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny, 1994; first published 1977).

12 See also the recent ‘turn to listening’ in media studies and political theory that invites an engagement with listening as an active contribution to justice or as an ethics of sharing. Since patterns of oppression and inequality result in the systematic distortion of some people's appearance and audibility, listening as a politics of ‘difference’ foregrounds, in the words of the sociologist Susan Bickford, a ‘creative process (which) might serve to … create a public realm where a plurality of voices, faces and languages can be heard and seen and spoken’. Susan Bickford, The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict and Citizenship (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 129. Leah Bassel expands this approach and advances acts of ‘listening as solidarity’, a horizontal politics of activism among different social groups that create a mutual ‘us’ for enabling practices of political equality. Leah Bassel, ‘Listening as Solidarity’, in Bassel, The Politics of Listening: Possibilities and Challenges for Democratic Life (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 71–88.

13 Adrienne Rich, ‘Notes toward a Politics of Location’, in Rich, Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979–1985 (New York: Norton, 1986), pp. 210–32.

14 Iain Chambers, Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorised Modernities (London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), p. 30.

15 Nancy N. Chen, ‘Speaking Nearby: A Conversation with Trinh T. Minh-ha’, Visual Anthropology Review, 8, 1 (Spring 1992), pp. 88–91. The feminist scholar Lidia Curti taught me to practise this approach; I'll always be grateful to her for this.

16 MB–MB is a partnership between CSC Centro per la Scena Contemporanea, Comune di Bassano del Grappa (Italy); La Briqueterie – Centre de développement chorégraphique du Val de Marne (France); HIPP The Croatian Institute for Dance and Movement (Croatia); D.ID Dance Identity (Austria). See www.migrantbodies.eu, accessed 10 November 2019.

17 Selamawit Biruk, transcription from www.migrantbodies.eu, accessed 11 November 2019.

18 Roberto Casarotto in MB–MB, online publication, p. 5.

19 Nora Chipaumire in ibid., p. 21.

20 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).

21 Paul Scolieri, ‘Introduction: Global/Mobile: Re-orienting Dance and Migration Studies’, Dance Research Journal, 40, 2 (2008), pp. v–xx, here p. v.

22 See Nicholas De Genova, ‘Spectacles of Migrant “Illegality”: The Scene of Exclusion, the Obscene of Inclusion’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36, 7 (2013), pp. 1180–98.

23 Mélanie Demers in MB–MB, online publication, pp. 8–9.

24 Iain Chambers, ‘Matter Out of Place: Migrating Modernity and Unauthorised Archives’, Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本跨文化, 12 (2017), pp. 1–9, here p. 5.

25 Gabriele Brandstetter, Gerko Egert and Holger Hartung, eds., Movements of Interweaving: Dance and Corporeality in Times of Travel and Migration (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2018), p. xi.

26 MB–MB, online publication, p. 59.

27 Ibid., p. 60.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid.

30 Nancy, Listening, p. 21

31 Private interview with Annika Pannitto (10 November 2019), concerning the music in her work On Hospitality, she says: ‘we listened to this music by Antonio Sanchez (made as a soundtrack for the movie Birdman by Inarritu), and we found it immediately resonating with what we were doing; we also liked it because it felt very concrete, essential, somehow very close to what we do with the dance material’.

32 Piazza/On Hospitality: A Practice of Living Together by Annika Pannitto in collaboration with Elisa D'Amico, video by Kim Schonewille, music Antonio Sanchez. See www.annikapannitto.com, accessed 25 October 2019.

33 Pannitto's choreographic notes. See https://piazzaproject.wordpress.com, accessed 22 November 2019.

34 Quoted from ‘The Dismeasure of Art: An Interview with Paolo Virno’, in Paul De Bruyne and Pascal Gilien, eds., Being an Artist in Post-Fordist Times (Rotterdam: NAI Publishers, 2012), pp. 19–46, here p. 23.

35 Josè Gil, ‘Paradoxical Body’, TDR, 50, 4 (2006), pp. 21–35; see also Gil, Metamorphosis of the Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998).

36 This is an exercise Pannitto first experienced with artist and sound maker Justin Bennett, during a workshop on field recording which proves particularly useful for her purpose.

37 Interview with Annika Pannitto.

38 Nancy, Listening, p. 11.

39 Ibid., p. 43.

40 Interview with Annika Pannitto.

41 Ibid.

42 See https://piazzaproject.wordpress.com/hospitality/first-toughts, accessed 22 November 2019.

43 The French-Algerian philosopher envisions what he calls the aporia of ‘unconditional hospitality’, always subsisting somewhere between certain finite conditions and the purely unconditional. See Jacques Derrida, Aporias (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); in Of Hospitality (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to respond.

44 ‘There is a future that is predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable. But there is a future, l'avenir (to come), which refers to someone who comes whose arrival is totally unexpected’. Jacques Derrida quoted in Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, Derrida: Screenplay and Essays on the Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 53.

45 Nancy, Listening, p. 21.

46 Lizzy Davies, ‘Italy Boatwreck: Scores of Migrants Die as Boat Sinks off Lampedusa’, Guadian Online, 3 October 2013, at www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/03/lampedusa-migrants-killed-boat-sinks-italy, accessed 20 May 2020.

47 See the collective film Open Borders (dir. Franck Boulègue and Marisa C. Hayes), Prod. Festival International de Vidéo Danse de Bourgogne, 2015, at www.numeridanse.tv/en/dance-videotheque/open-borders, accessed 20 December 2020.

48 Drifting, Natalia Barua (choreography) Owa Barua (sound), also available at www.choreooo.org, accessed 22 May 2020.

49 Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), italics in original.

50 Astrida Neimanis, ‘Water and Knowledge’, in Dorothy Christian and Rita Wong, eds., Downstream: Reimagining Water (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2017), pp. 51–68, here p. 54.

51 Here, I refer to the law of the EU on immigration governing entry into the European Union and underscoring the differences between the rules that exist between member states that are part of the Schengen Area (free movement) and those that are not. See the dossier concerning the EU law regulating ‘flows of migration’, ‘asylum procedures’ and ‘relocation programmes’ in the Mediterranean, at https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/infographics/migration/public/index.html?page=migration, accessed March 2021.

52 Jean L. Nancy, Corpus (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. 17–19.

53 Synopsis of Liquid Path (2013); see also A. Piccirillo, ‘Danzare/Archiviare: La memoria delle corporalità liquide’, in S. Carotenuto, C. Ianniciello and A. Piccirillo, eds., Matri-archivio del Mediterraneo: Grafie e Materie (Naples: Unior Press, 2017), pp. 77–88. This volume is the outcome of the Matri-archive of Mediterranean research project, a digital platform that collects multiform examples of female Mediterranean creativity; see also www.matriarchiviomediterraneo.org, accessed 1 May 2020 for a longer version of Liquid Path.

54 Nancy, Listening, p. 37.

55 Ibid.

56 During the COVID-19 pandemic, migration flows in the Mediterranean have not stopped, and the migrant, the Other, has again been the object of discriminatory discourses based on the false claim that he/she is responsible for the arrival or the spread of the virus. During this time, deprivation of touch and of human contact has been globally experienced. In the face of this, we need to rethink the value of ‘being together’; we need to rethink the power of humanism in the face of a pandemic that is, in many ways, a mirror of humanity. On the value of ‘contact’ during the pandemic see the beautiful critical reflections published in ConTactos edited by Diana Taylor and Marcial Godoy-Anativia (HemiPress, the Hemispheric Institute's digital publication imprint, 2020) at https://contactos.tome.press; and more specifically the contribution of María Emilia Tijoux, ‘The Migrant Subject in Pandemic Times: Against the Construction of an “Enemy,” Towards Humanism and Solidarity’, at https://contactos.tome.press/the-migrant-subject-in-pandemic-times, accessed June 2020.

57 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ‘Epistemologies of the South and the Future’, From the European South, 1 (2016), pp. 17–29, here p. 21. The chapter ‘The Deep Experience of the Senses’ – in de Sousa Santos, The End of the Cognitive Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), pp. 165–84 – focuses on the sensory methodologies of the post-abyssal researcher: she must practise ‘deep listening’, which is about affirming difference – listening to understand, not to respond. Interesting is the concept of ‘deep-self silencing’ as the condition of listening to the voice of the inaudible subaltern.

58 Migration Film Dance Project, choreographer Sandy Silva, director Marlene Millar, partners and funders Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec, Canada Council for the Arts, Cinédanse Québec; Stéla Festival desArts//DesCines accompagnement developpement & strategie. See https://sandysilvadance.com/migrationproject.pdf; artists, casts and crew: https://sandysilvadance.com/artists.html, accessed 22 May 2020.

59 See Anita Gritsch, ‘Percussive Dances’, at https://anitagritsch.weebly.com, accessed 20 May 2020.

60 Elody Berger and Daniela Muhling, ‘The Beat and the Pulse’, Tom Tom Magazine, 14 (2013), p. 10, at https://issuu.com/tomtommagazine/docs/tomtom_issue14_final/10, accessed 15 May 2020.

61 See the trailer for Migration at https://vimeo.com/125045584, accessed 22 May 2020.

62 See the trailer for Pilgrimage at https://vimeo.com/213953487, accessed 22 May 2020.

63 See the trailer for Traverse at https://vimeo.com/262507133, accessed 22 May 2020.

64 Silva and Millar are well aware of the privileges associated with their personal freedom to move: ‘As the refugee crisis unfolds in parallel with our making of these short films, we are acutely aware of the deep tragedy of millions of displaced persons and our own privilege of living in a peaceful country’. See https://sandysilvadance.com/migrationproject.pdf, accessed 22 May 2020.

65 Nancy, Listening, p. 41.

66 For an understanding of choreography as ‘body writing’ see, for example, Mark Franko, ‘Mimique’, in Ellen W. Goellner and Jeaqueline Shea Murphy, eds., Bodies of the Texts (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), pp. 205–16; and André Lepecki, ed., Of the Presence of the Body (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004).

67 ‘The “dance world” is a nomadic one’: all subjectivities involved in dance move and look, for instance, for ‘economic prosperity, political asylum, religious and/or artistic liberty’. Scolieri, ‘Introduction’, p. vi.

68 Clémentine Proby, ‘Migrating Sounds: Space and Displacement in Contemporary Art’ (May 2018), at www.academia.edu/37883658/Migrating_Sounds_Space_and_Displacement_in_Contemporary_Art, accessed 2 November 2019.

69 LaBelle, Brandon, Background Noise: Perspective on Sound Art (New York and London: Continuum, 2006), p. xiGoogle Scholar.

70 Moten, Fred, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

71 Jacques Derrida quoted in Dick and Kofman, Derrida, p. 53.