Give Place to Grief: the Construction of Memory to the Ustica Massacre

Abstract

On 27th June 1980, Itavia Airlines flight India Hotel 870 took off from Bologna bound for Palermo with 81 passengers and crew aboard. An hour into the flight, around 9 p.m., it disappeared from the radar screens. A few hours later, wreckage from the DC-9 was spotted in the Tyrhennian Sea off the island of Ustica, near Sicily. There were no survivors. The cause of the tragedy remains one of Italy’s most enduring mysteries. On 27th June 2006, a convoy of trucks carrying the airplane’s fragments made a journey back to Bologna. Here the plane was reassembled once again. And around the relics, the French artist Christian Boltanski, whose work is always involved with memory and loss, created an emotional installation, with 81 pulsing lamps hanging over the plane, 81 black mirrors with 81 loudspeakers behind them, diffusing a subdued murmur of simple thoughts/worries of everyday life for people going on holiday. The Museum for the Memory of Ustica created a “place of memory” for a massacre without a place: the plane disappeared from the sky and sunk in a deep point of the Mediterranean Sea.