A blue ship-shaped silhouette welcomes visitors to an exhibition marking ten years of the migrant rescue NGO Sea-Watch's activities.

Those entering are invited to experience for themselves just how little space there is on boats crossing the Mediterranean Sea, boats requiring days exposed to both good and bad weather in severely overcrowded conditions to approach their destinations.

The exhibition is entitled Non è Stato il Mare (which translates as 'It Wasn't the Sea' but with a wordplay inherent in the use of "Stato' , in that the latter also means 'state' ) in Italy's northern city of Milan from September 4 to 28.

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Sections of exhibition

The exhibition includes videos, front pages of newspapers recounting the tragedies at sea that have occurred over the past decade, and objects used in the rescue vessels. The objects are from the decommissioned vessel Sea-Watch 3 and are normally held at the Berlin Museum of Technology.

Among them are life vests, including ones for infants, beds for women and children, for use after they are rescued from the sea and also used by the crew.

Panels and photographs are also used to explain Sea Watch's history and how sea rescues work.

"We would never have imagined, ten years ago, that we would be here," Sea-Watch spokesperson Giorgia Linardi said.

"This means that there are still people in the hands of traffickers who continue to die at sea and are in danger."

"We came onto the scene to fill an institutional gap," she added, "that has now become a clear political choice."

"What are we talking about when we talk about sea rescues, migration conditions, pushbacks, and immigration politics? Non è Stato il Mare offers a cross-media route with photos, audio, video, and objects that aims to facilitate and bring back this essential conversation back into the spotlight," said curator Elisa Medde.

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'Abandoned and criminalized by the authorities'

"We were not only abandoned by the authorities, who drastically reduced cooperation with us. Lest we forget, there is also an ongoing push for the criminalisation of NGOs' operations," Linardi said on the sidelines of the presentation of the exhibition.

"Since 2023, a law has been in place according to which NGOs have to disembark in places very far away [from the point of rescue], precisely in order to keep them far from the Mediterranean at a time when there is the need for them," she continued, adding that "cooperation between civil society and the state is fundamental for the protection of lives at sea. However, unfortunately, this has not been the driving principle behind policies for the Mediterranean for many years."

The exhibition Non è Stato il Mare, the NGO spokesperson added, "has the word Stato with an uppercase S since it points more at the institution of the state that brought in policies for the abandonment and pushback of people in the Mediterranean."

"It is ten years of activity, Sea Watch has helped to rescue over 47,000 people in the Mediterranean. However, 30,000 either died, are still missing, or drowned in the same sea. What we want to say to those who come to see the exhibition is that it was not the sea [to do this]. These tragedies, in many cases, were avoidable."

One such example happened on September 4, 2024, she added, "when seven people were rescued off Lampedusa. Two days before, we had sighted -- with our monitoring aircraft -- 28 people on the same vessel, all of whom were alive. These people were abandoned for two days and 21 drowned to death off our coasts despite the fact that all the authorities were informed" of their presence, she noted.

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