Across Europe’s maritime borders, the sea has been transformed from a place of passage into a weaponised graveyard. Thousands of people have drowned in the Mediterranean, not only as victims of accidental vessel malfunction or unpredictable weather but as casualties of deliberate obstruction, abandonment and violence at sea. Many of these deaths are not coincidences, they are the direct outcome of a political architecture that uses the sea itself as a weapon of deterrence. EU’s border agency, Frontex, and the various national coastguards it collaborates with have repeatedly orchestrated or been complicit in ‘pushbacks’, forced returns and non-assistance, yet the bureaucratic language of ‘border management’ continues to obscure these abhorrent acts.

This Media Studies project seeks to expose this brutality through the production of a wooden oar, a symbol of propulsion, human effort and survival. The engraving of case codes of these violent incidences onto the blade of the oar are drawn from the databases of the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) Missing Migrants Project (2014–2025). Each code corresponds to a documented case of deaths or disappearances in the Mediterranean, where deliberate violence, neglect, interception, or impediment of rescue, was the determining cause of death. By inscribing these codes onto a section of the oar’s blade, the sculpture seeks to transform these sanitised records into a eulogy for the dead, a silent counter protest which attempts to confront audiences with the magnitude, reality and systematic normalisation that renders such tragic deaths invisible. The sculpture is accompanied by a file containing a selection of the details behind some of the incident cases referenced on the oar. Alongside these, the addition of material produced by Forensic Architecture which further highlights instances of violence at sea, while not always resulting in fatalities, provides evidence of significant abuse and underscores the importance of exposing all these unjust actions.

In response to the overarching theme of critical refusal, this work resists the bureaucratic and visual systems that render border violence invisible or inevitable. By focusing solely on those cases where violence, obstruction, or deliberate neglect have caused death, the project counters the dominant narrative that portrays migration as a “crisis” of movement rather than a crisis of policy. This selective exposure is a deliberate act of defiance, an insistence on naming violence where it has been obscured by the language of “management” and “security.” It attempts to assert the human cost of Europe’s border practices through material exposure. The oar becomes a counter-object, an object of resistance materialising both the data and the human touch that official accounts erase. It attempts to confront audiences without sensationalising suffering. As an act of critical refusal, the work stands against indifference, erasure, and the ongoing weaponisation of the sea.