Mare Nostrum: letters for lost lives

An artist tells the stories of journeys that end fatally

Munich. "Man, found near El Sarchal, Ceuta" is written in black on one of the stones lying on the table in front of Peter Weismann, "Ahmed" on another or just "NN", a sign for one of the many strangers, who drowned on the run in the Mediterranean.

The Munich artist Peter Weismann engraves the names of the refugees who drowned in the Mediterranean on pebbles that he collected on the Isar.

Cause of death: escape

35.000 victims listed in the summer of 2019 Book "Cause of Death Escape" on. People who perished while fleeing across the Mediterranean, most of them drowned because their overloaded boats sank. Peter Weismann wants us not to forget them.

The 76-year-old goes to the Isar again and again, collects the stones smoothly polished by the river, brings them to his workshop in the open air and engraves them with other names or the two letters NN.

Migration is not a crime

"Every eight meters" he places one of the labeled stones back on the Isar, from the source of the river in the Alps to the mouth of the Danube.

"Migration is human existence - not a crime," says Peter Weismann. It is "part of human history since Adam and Eve were expelled from paradise." Man wanders across the earth in search of conditions that secure his life. Publishing bookseller, political scientist and theater director Weismann wants to show the poetry and aesthetics that lie in the history of these people and, above all, he wants us not to look the other way when refugees drown in the Mediterranean Sea. “Mare Nostrum” is what he calls his landscape art project. It is our sea.

This year works Weismann in Landshut continue with his project - because of Corona "in camera"

LINK