Over the past 15 years, between the coasts of Africa and Italy, over 30,000 migrants have died in the Mediterranean Sea in an attempt to reach Europe and seek a better life. Most of them still remain unnamed.

The Last Shipwreck draws its main inspiration from the painting Le Radeau de la Méduse (1819) by Jean-Louis Théodore Géricault. A painting, in turn, inspired by a tragic episode that occurred in early July 1816: off the Senegalese coast, a raft twenty meters long and seven meters wide, built with the remains of the French navy frigate “Medusa”, was deliberately abandoned at the mercy of the strong currents of the ocean with its cargo stacked beyond belief of 152 men. Between visible and invisible, the signs, faces, bodies of the shipwreck of yesterday and today short-circuit in a single sorrowful portrait of the sinking of meaning.

Where the wood of the Cross and the boards of a drifting raft merge in the latitudes and longitudes of now useless geographical maps. But the ultimate custody of the human is not yet that of darkness.

In the electroacoustic sound, the chasing and wrapping like waves of superimposed variations of the first 16 bars of Matthäus-Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach (BWV 244, n.1). The variations on this theme bring about the loss, the mechanicalness, and finally the drowning in the single chords, in the single lines of expanded counterpoint, in search of the elsewhere, over the limits of the “infinitely small” in which is hidden what we cannot yet understand.

The Last Shipwreck is the 3rd part of the audiovisual trilogy “Naufragi”.