Love Difference Tour and world tour mediterraneo
Travelling the Mediterranean



Project by WoToM team in collaboration with Love Difference

The sailing boat “Love Difference” retraces the migration streams of the Mediterranean sea and wants to build new contacts between people, cultures and institutions. It becomes carrier of individual stories, as both migrants and people living in the port towns are getting involved in creative actions that try to open up a new kind of dialogue. Interviews, drawings and recordings are going to document the encounters.

The Mediterranean sea is a point of encounter, movement and exchange, which is getting travelled by tourists, fishermen and salesmen. But also hundreds of migrants are crossing the Mediterranean each day, risking their lives in the search of wealth and happiness, which they are trying to find in the richer northern parts of the world. Coming from all over Africa, they are trying to surpass the borders of Europe through Tarifa, Otranto and Lampedusa.

The Love Difference Tour will retrace with a small sailing boat the routes of the major immigration streams crossing the Mediterranean sea. In August 2005 it will sail the highly frequented passage from Libia to Italy, via the shores of Sicily and Lampedusa. The aim of the retracing is to get close to the reality of the immigrants and to try to understand more about the phenomenon than it is possible through reports in television and newspapers.

As both a politic and an artistic movement, Love Difference will launch a series of artistic actions, didactic workshops and cultural events, that will involve both the migrants and the people living in the area. These actions are aimed at revealing the individual aspect of immigration as well as they are trying to show the mechanisms of immigration politics from a different, an artistic viewpoint. Starting from these interventions, the Love Difference boat will become an archive and carrier of personal stories and elements of traditions that the immigrants have to leave behind them. To reach Europe, they often have to literally throw overboard a large part of their identity, like their passports. Hoping for a future life in Europe therefore means to have to cancel important parts of their past lives.

The stories of the clandestines, which are in risk of getting lost, will get collected by the Love Difference Tour and carried on behalf of the migrants to Europe. Experts and researchers – such as sociologists, anthropologists and local politicians – will get invited to travel together with the boat crew from one stop to the next, to collect experiences and to comment the topic from a scientific point of view.

An exhibition will then be organized, which will create a physical space for the material collected during the encounters, and it will deepen the idea of the boat as an archive. On occasion of the opening of the exhibition discussions that will reflect the topics emerged will be held.

Artistic actions by:	ts Beall
	Pratul Kumar Dash
	Walid Mawe'd
	Julia Trolp

WoToM team world tour mediterraneo
navigare tra le differenze [sailing amongst differences]



Project in collaboration with Love Difference
At the 50th Venice Biennale Love Difference presented the
‘Mediterranean World Tour’ - a Wotom team1 project developed from an idea by Diego Paccagnella -, the aim of which is to promote new forms of exchange and interaction between the different Mediterranean cultures.
‘Fieramosca’, a minitransit boat, sailed from Venice in July 2003 on the first leg of its tour, to Zara-Zadar in Croatia.
In this project the Mediterranean Sea is viewed as a large basin where languages, cultures and experiences come together and establish a dialogue leading to an acceptance of differences. The boat has the Love Difference logo on the sail as a symbol of the journey towards the ‘other’. The ‘six-metre’ boat is sailed without a compass and boards vessels it encounters on the way. On board the coffee offered by the crew is a gesture of hospitality and a pretext for establishing new relationships, promoting the exchange not of goods but of experiences. In this way the ‘World Tour Mediterranean’ stimulates new encounters with cultural, economic and political partners in the different Mediterranean countries.

The Wotom team consists of skippers Tiziano Rossetti and Raul Pantaleo, the artist Diego Paccagnella and Filippo Fabbrica, the coordinator of the Love Difference project.

World Tour Mediterraneo partner:
Via Bizzuno – luce www.viabizzuno.com
Lago-design www.lago.it

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