Dead Reckoning
2015
Edition 46
Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin
Every year in mid-November, Edition 46 of the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin is published. It's our art issue, which boasts a long tradition: Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, Anselm Kiefer, Matthew Barney – world-renowned artists have already created exclusive designs for this magazine. Last year, South African photographer Roger Ballen presented previously unpublished works. This year, the focus isn't on a single artist, but rather on a geographical and cultural region: the Mediterranean.
As a link between Southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, it has been a focal point and a constant topic in the news for months. Not a day goes by without countless images of the coasts of Italy or Greece appearing on our screens. The same places where we relax on deck chairs year after year are now full of desperate people from Eritrea, Libya, and Syria. They arrive by boat across the water—if they arrive at all—and don't lose their lives during the crossing.
The Mediterranean has become a symbol. For what, remains to be seen: bridge or border? Opportunity or curse? For this issue, we asked artists from 16 Mediterranean countries to each create a work on the theme of the Mediterranean for the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin. Those who look closely at the works will sense the potential for conflict within this cultural space, but also its rich history, its power to forge identity – and its unifying beauty.
Commissioned by Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, Edition 46: The Mediterranean, Dead Reckoning was produced for the annual art edition of Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, which invited sixteen artists from across the Mediterranean region to respond to the sea as both a geographical reality and a contested political space. Conceived during a period when migration across the Mediterranean occupied the centre of European political discourse, the work revisits and reactivates themes that have remained central to Mark Mangion's practice for over a decade.
The project originates from The Departure (2007), a film in which several African migrants living in Malta were invited to learn to sail years after arriving on the island via dangerous sea crossings from North Africa. For many of the participants, the sailing trip marked their first return to the water since their journey across the Mediterranean. What began as a seemingly simple recreational activity gradually became a space in which memories, fears, humour, trauma, and companionship surfaced through casual conversation and shared experience.
For Dead Reckoning, Mangion transcribed the entire dialogue from the film, transforming spoken exchanges into a textual work. Detached from their original moving-image context, the conversations acquire a new form of presence. Fragments of speech oscillate between the mundane and the profound, between practical discussions about sailing and subtle recollections of migration, uncertainty, and survival. The resulting text exists somewhere between script, testimony, poetry, and document.
The title refers to the navigational technique of determining one's position by calculating distance travelled from a previously known point without direct reference to external markers. Historically associated with maritime travel, dead reckoning carries particular resonance within the context of migration across the Mediterranean, where countless journeys have been undertaken without reliable maps, instruments, or certainty of arrival. As both method and metaphor, the term evokes conditions of disorientation, faith, memory, and endurance.
At the centre of the work lies the Mediterranean itself. Often romanticised as a site of cultural exchange, leisure, and shared history, the sea simultaneously functions as one of the most heavily politicised and contested borders in the world. In Dead Reckoning, the Mediterranean appears not as landscape but as lived experience—a space where radically different histories intersect and where movement is shaped by unequal conditions of freedom, necessity, and risk.
By translating a filmed encounter into text, Mangion shifts attention away from spectacle and towards language itself. The work resists the visual clichés that often dominate representations of migration, instead foregrounding moments of hesitation, humour, vulnerability, and everyday conversation. Through these seemingly ordinary exchanges, larger questions of displacement, belonging, memory, and identity quietly emerge.
Ultimately, Dead Reckoning reflects on the fragile human realities that exist behind political narratives and statistical abstractions. It proposes the act of navigation not simply as a movement across physical territory, but as an ongoing negotiation with uncertainty. Situated between document and artwork, the piece transforms a conversation at sea into a meditation on migration, memory, and the complex geographies of the contemporary Mediterranean.
Suddeutsche Zeitung Interview with Mangion
"The Mediterranean is my home, even though I currently live in New York and will probably always lead a nomadic life. But I was born in Malta, this tiny and at the time quite isolated island in the Mediterranean, and I associate many childhood memories with the coast and the water."
Almost ten years ago, I began working on a series of films dealing with the topic of migration. I was particularly interested in the role of Malta, which, as a point of entry and transit halfway between Africa and Europe, was drawn into the logic of migration and refugees. When I received the invitation to participate in Edition 46 , I immediately thought of one of these films. It's called The Departure , and I thought that if I adapted and revived this film, perhaps a connection could be drawn between the current situation and a time almost ten years in the past, but relevant to the complex situation we find ourselves in today. At the time, I had invited four Africans to learn to sail; men who had come to Malta across the Mediterranean a few years earlier. The sailing trip was their first direct contact with the sea since their escape ; they were back on the water. I transcribed parts of this film and put them into dialogue form. The short scene is called "Dead Reckoning" and is partly banal and funny because the men have to deal with the boat, but also sad because they are reminded of what they have been through.