“In the desert I saw a tomb, it belonged to a girl from Douala, and I wondered if her father and mother, her brothers and sisters knew that their little girl was there”.
Corpi migranti was born like this, from the words of a young Cameroonian.

It was 2015 when Max Hirzel began to document the systems for managing the bodies of migrants who died while trying to reach Italy. Starting from Sicilian cemeteries, to understand where and how these bodies are buried, how many had been given a name or what was written when the name was missing. This long investigation would end, a few years later, in a village in Saloum, Senegal.

The fragments of this investigation show us the death of young migrants, the management of their bodies and an often impossible mourning.
To the collective perception of ineluctable fatality and inevitable tragedy, this work opposes a bare vision of what revolves around these bodies to reveal reality for what it is: what Max Hirzel defines as “anomaly”, an aberration that we should neither allow nor accept.

In the words of Federico Faloppa: “Corpi migranti helps us not to consume the anomaly. It asks us to break the story and its geometries – of welcome, of rejections, of remains aligned by forensic medicine, of objects and traces, of the anonymous regularity of zinc coffins and tombstones – because nothing of what we are seeing is commensurable, duplicable, sortable.”

If immigration is increasingly a “political object” that divides between opposing opinions and factions, the “naked” language of these images leads us, beyond the usual noise, to the responsibility of being human.