The ultimate stranger: the Ferryman of Death

In Xenon I’ve been exploring notions of strangers, their associations and iconography. The theme of death as the ultimate stranger of the existential beyond emerged early on in the work. In essence, death is un-representable, but has been the source of a rich iconography varying from the skeletal form to insects, specific colours, musical instrument etc. The image of the Ferryman of Death, who transports the souls from the land of the living to the land of the dead, with a river separating the two realms, is a common one. The ancient Greek version of the boatman (Charon) who demanded a coin from the dead in order to deliver their soul to Hades (hence the coins found on mouth of the dead) transformed into the popular image of a boatman wearing a black cloak, holding a scythe. A dancing skeleton beating a snare-drum or playing the fiddle is another iconic representation of the character of Death. Whatever shape Death takes, he inhabits an in-between realm: between water and land, between darkness and light.

It is precisely my thinking of this liminal terrain and strangers that drew my research to representations of refugees, asylum seekers and illegal immigrants. Often pursued by the law, they inhabit a shady realm of invisibility, underrepresentation and non-belonging. A figure that I repeatedly encountered in the south of the Mediterranean is that of illegal immigrants, often from North Africa, walking under the hot summer sun along the beech, selling their merchandise to tourists. Unable to receive job permits and licences for shops, they resort to carrying their ‘shops’: such as enormous trays of food and heavy trays of drinks. But most of all, the image that has stayed imprinted in my memory is that of emaciated men carrying heaps of multicoloured inflatable beech toys. It is the combination of the visual contrast between the enormous volume of their merchandise and lack of volume of their bodies, and the complex associations of provisional inflatable devices used by many immigrants to travel the deadly waters between Africa and Europe that make the iconography of these figures poignant.

Staging an unlikely meeting of strangers, Act 2 of the Xenon project features a death scene in which a character inspired by the iconography of death beating a drum and that of the beech-inflatable immigrant seller emerges like ghost out of the sea. Xenon Act 3 which is a video work set in a desolate disused coalmine, also features the same character who comes to haunt the site and walk across the edges of the mine in a scene inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s representation of the dance of death in the closing sequence of his film The Seventh Seal.