Paintings & Street Art
This street art piece depicts all kinds of people in turmoil. The water seems to represent the journey itself of migration. With fish eating humans and several individuals crammed into one small bowl-like raft, only one powerful individual seems to stand out. The one person who seems bold enough to overcome these hurdles in the water (throughout the journey) seems to be steering himself on a raft made of (what looks like) water. This imagery is important towards the meaning the painting is conveying about immigration. From the details, it seems as if the painting is making the point that the journey is difficult, but some will make it to the other end while others will not. This reminds me of Nuevomondo in the sense that several people were shown to travel the whole way, but not everyone made it past Ellis Island.
Like many other immigration-related art pieces, this one depicts a boat amidst an empty body of water. However, unlike many other paintings, this one has very few objects/points of attraction, rather it shows a simple boat in an intricate fashion. The method through which this painting was constructed involves deep intricacy with each stroke since the water is made purely of lines in different patterns, the boat has a simple outline, and the boat is filled with dots/circles. While the curvy lines making the water might represent the waves/currents, the dots/circles in the boat might represent people. This image draws a strong resemblance to Nuevomondo because of how full the boat taking all the Italian immigrants to Ellis Island was. The parallelism between that film and this painting seems fitting of most mass immigration periods.
This piece has an extremely abstract vibe to it since a variety of colors are used along with depictions of some of the most prominent things of important in Italy. Shown in the painting is a woman’s face – expressionless – with the Coliseum right next to her, followed by a statue of a horse and some more Roman architecture on the edge. Most interestingly, however, the words written across the painting indicate something even more: amor (love), freedom, freaks, and fools. All these words are very different from each other, yet they paint a story for the viewer of an Italy that encompasses all these aspects. In relevance to migration, this painting holds significance with these very words; for some people these words could mean positive and empowering reasons to migrate to Italy, while for others they could mean negative reasons to migrate to someplace else from Italy.
