La Corona

A crown of light for those who did not return — painted on the anniversary of the tragedy.

La Corona is a mural created by artist Neve on October 3, 2019 in Lampedusa, with the support of Gariwo – Garden of the Righteous Worldwide.

"La Corona" is a large-scale outdoor mural painted on October 3, 2019 in Lampedusa, on the occasion of the anniversary of the October 3 tragedy — the date that Italy has designated as the National Day in Memory of the Victims of Immigration, marking the 2013 shipwreck in which 368 migrants drowned within sight of the island. The work was sponsored by Gariwo (Garden of the Righteous Worldwide) and came about through contact with Vito Fiorino — the Lampedusa fisherman who, on that October morning in 2013, pulled dozens of survivors from the sea with his own boat, and became known as the hero of Lampedusa. The subject is a funeral wreath — white gerbera daisies and yellow chrysanthemums, rendered in hyperrealist detail with water droplets on every petal — seen from below the surface of the sea. The composition shows the wreath floating at the waterline: from above, a dense mass of flowers; from below, where the viewer is, a curved water surface refracting light, the wreath hovering just at the threshold between air and sea. The white wall is the underwater space. The flowers are wet. The image originated from a specific gesture: Pope Francis, during his first apostolic visit to Lampedusa in 2013, had thrown a crown of flowers into the sea in memory of the drowned. Neve saw that gesture and found it inadequate to its context — something thrown into the water for people who had drowned in it. "What would it look like from below?" he asked himself. He imagined the crown from the perspective of those at the bottom — and then decided to paint it there, on a wall in Lampedusa, to save it. At least the wreath. The two gooseneck lamp fixtures already mounted on the building wall are incorporated naturally into the mural composition, framing the wreath on either side. The inauguration took place on the evening of October 3, 2019, in front of a crowd gathered beneath the mural. Also photographed: one of the large wooden migrant boats moored in Lampedusa harbor at sunset — the vessels that carried people across and sometimes did not arrive.