Political, legal, and media discourse around ‘boat-migrants’ arriving in Lampedusa share a tendency to focus on an unnamed and anonymous mass of people in order to build and sustain a Border Spectacle revolving around immigration to Italy. In this context, where very little space is usually left to individual migrant voices, this article challenges this common understanding of immigration to Lampedusa by showing a different side of the story, a story told by the real actors of the Mediterranean passage, the migrants themselves, who, by relying on the realm of aesthetics, have managed to gain visibility and to become ‘subjects of power.’ © The Society for Italian Studies 2016.

Lampedusa aesthetics Subjects of power Boat migrants Visibility/invisibility Border spectacle

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