A few days more
'Seba Kurtis ‘A few days more’ series pictures waiting Egyptian immigrants on the coast of North Africa and the increasing travel hazards due to the lengthier journey across the Mediterranean caused by Italian closed-border policies. [For this series] Kurtis chose […] to open the camera’s chamber while taking some specific shots. Instead of solarizing all the material, the project includes some partially or almost completely fogged images along with copies of undamaged negatives. Paradoxically, undamaged images are mainly depictions of damaged objects (for instance, a weather-worn parasol where the immigrants wait for their ship). This series of photographs presents a non-homogeneous corpus in which the abstract image of an almost complete fogging coexists with disturbing erasure of the face of a portrait due to a partial solarization or the depiction of damaged objects in unvandalized images. […] The interplay between damage and no damage, both of the negatives and the portrayed objects, suggests the existence of different regimes for the technical devices. The state administration of migrants determines, through the ‘correct use’ of technical devices, which lives are valuable and which are not, which bodies matter and which do not. On the contrary, the solarized face of a waiting migrant standing in front of an iconic Western soft-drink poster is an eloquent example of the hesitation of indexicality and of the blurring of photographic identification to represent irregular migration.’
– Agustin Berti and Andrea Torrano, Politics of (Un)Documented, 2014
