Michel Kekulé

50_15 was developed in spring 2022 on board the Sea-Watch 3 in the central Mediterranean. The series shows a distress case in which a boat sank and people on the move drowned. The title 50_15 condenses the relation between survival and death.

The images are taken during an ongoing operation. The camera is situated within the same situation in which people are rescued, treated and searched for. The series does not provide an overview. Its fragmentation is a consequence of the conditions under which it is produced: a situation in which visibility is not freely available but determined by the conditions under which the event unfolds. What becomes visible is limited to immediate situations: proximity, contact and action, as well as moments of exhaustion and acute danger, extending to situations of near drowning.

The images are part of the same order in which this event becomes visible at all. They do not simply show what happens but follow a logic in which visibility concentrates on situations of extreme vulnerability. In this form, people appear in moments of exhaustion, dependency and rescue. This visibility conveys the urgency of the situation, while at the same time risking a reduction of people to these moments.

The series stays close to these situations without resolving or framing them. It refuses overview and contextualisation and remains bound to the conditions under which these images become possible. This limitation is not only located in the frame but within the political order itself: what becomes visible is primarily the situation of rescue, while the structures that produce it do not appear in the same way. The images thus follow a logic in which visibility is tied to the event, while its political conditions remain outside representation.

Beyond the specific event, 50_15 points to a border death regime in which rescue, deterrence and violence do not appear separately. The images do not show a completed catastrophe. They show a situation in which help becomes necessary because political structures accept death. Solidarity takes shape here as a concrete practice in the contact between bodies and remains bound to the same structures that produce and constrain it.

2025, 50_15 - EMOP Special, European Month of Photography Berlin, GER