The 2022 Barba Varley Prize of 10,000 euros will be divided between two projects:

The project by Francesco Piobicchi, “Memoramica” of Mediterranean Hope/Fcei, Lampedusa (Italy), who built the cemetery for unidentified migrants who arrived lifeless to Lampedusa.

In the last twenty-five years, about forty thousand people have died while crossing the Mediterranean.

More than half of these were swallowed up by the sea; the rest were buried in the cemeteries of southern European countries.

In Colombia the prize will be awarded to the collective of artists “Magdalenas por el Cauca” (Yorladi Ruiz, Gabriel Posada). According to the “Colombian Centre for Historical Memory” in 2013 the collective Magdalenas por el Cauca gathered the relatives of the victims of the Trujillo massacre and the communities of Marsella and Beltrán to build 327 rafts and make them navigate the last 200 metres of a small river starting in Marsella and flowing into the Cauca.

The idea was born following the 482 autopsies of unidentified people in the cemetery of Marsella, carried out by the Institute of Forensic Medicine in 2012. Of these people, 155 have been identified but 327 remain without identity.

Hence the idea of local communities to build a cemetery for people without identity.

Subsequently, a group of artists held a festival with installations reminiscent of the nameless.

Message from the Colombian Minister of Culture, Patricia Ariza for the Barba Varley Prize