The Border, or Mirroedshore: Mazara del Vallo/Tunis. Italia. Sicilia. Tunisia. La Goulette

Mazara del Vallo is a small town on the south coast of Sicily facing the narrow band of Mediterranean Sea that separates southern Europe and the African coast. On the globe of the world that sits upon my desk, if I place a pinky between that narrow band of Mediteranean sea, I obscure half of Tunisia, and the entire island of Sicily. A similar sense of scalic dissolution occurs standing on the shore of Mazara del Vallo; you look out at the horizon and feel that the tip of North Africa is visible; that only a fingernail's breadth separates you from another language, another religion, and a continent.

Mazara del Vallo was originally founded by the Arabs, and is one of the largest fishing ports in Italy. Its fleet spreads out along the port-canal that crosses the city. For some thirty years it has been one of the major poles of Tunisian emigration to Sicily. This emigrant population has resettled in the casbah, which has been almost abandoned by the orginal inhabitants of Mazara and lies in a state of considerable decay. Walking down narrow coridors, African and Middle Eastern ryhthms vibrate between the walls; a girls skips rope; a house wihout windows stands, a single lightbulb inside.

The branch of sea between Sicily and Tunisia is today one of the principal corridors of clandestine immigration between Europe and Africa; but the migratory movements between the two populations has a longer and unknown history in this stretch of sea. Beginning in the 1970s, the commuting of Tunisian and Sicilian fishermen between the two coasts has gradually come to favour the forming of two satellite communities along the Sicilian and Tunisian shores. This has been due in part to the tendency of the fishermen to share the same fishing areas, often situated in international waters

Mazara del Vallo constitutes a true frontier. Waves of new immigrants from all of Africa transit through here and other places on this side of the Sicilian coast, then spread more-or-less illegally throughout the rest of Europe.

When you stand on the shore of Mazara del Vallo, you stand before a mirror: across the sea from the old cobblestoned square of Mazara del Vallo, where men quietly seated on a public bench in the cobblestoned square gently decline into old age, their heads bent toward the sea, there stands a Sicilian in La Goulette, looking out over the same sea: a mirroed shore. There is almost the glimpse, as much real as imagined, of a Tunisian community in the old Mazara Kasbah: a dynamic population integrated into professional fishing, the fields and the vineyards, and that has for some years also started to settle in the more modern districts of the city. On the other side of the sea is La Goulette, an antique village in the vicinity of Tunis, inhabited by the second generation of a well-established Italian community who arrived there following a massive and opposing migratory wave from Sicily and southern Italy towards Tunisia; a forgotten movement of population which concluded in the 1970s.

The diocese of Mazara is one of the most ancient of Sicily and was founded by Count Ruggero in 1093, after the liberation from Arab domination. The first bishiop was Stefano di Rouen (1093-1142), relation of Reuggero, who, being Benedictine, favoured the founding in the area the dioceses of numerous convents and monasteries of the order.

Throughout the years therefore, the two coasts have been a theatre of continuous movements, the exchanging of cultural and culinary traditions, and mixed marriages, often in the form of bigamy. It has been an exchange of individuals, traditions, experiences, and memories that has created a game of mirrors between the two coastal territories, moulding two landscapes that today have much in common, even if separated by one of the most rigid borders in the contemporary world--that which separates the Islamic Mediterranean and the Christian Mediterranean.

The two satellite communities have founded their subsistence on fishing, particularly bountiful in this part of the sea; the fishing boats have themselves regulated the fishing areas according to their own convenience and need, frequently ignoring fishing regulations and boundaries of territorial waters. The boat crews are often mixed Sicilian and Tunisian, and not infrequently some fishermen embark with the sole intention of being ferried towards the opposite coast to reach their families. This stretch of sea has become a kind of "black hole", an inter-dimensional door that negotiates the cultural and physical difference between the two extreme points of Europe and Africa. Nevertheless, while in the fishing activities this reciprocation is evident and visible, in the two terminals of this movement (Mazara and Tunis) the presence of the two satellite communities is almost imperceptible, even if by now so rooted as to constitute a stable character of the indigenous landscape.

In the two geographical coastal extremes of Mazara and La Goulette, the integration of the two cultures has happened without causing upheaval or sudden grafts on the respective urban landscapes, but rather through a gradual inclusion of new places, and new ways of living in the indigenous urban tissue. The "skin" of the two towns does not declare this mixture of cultures, but instead confirms it in the landscape of internal spaces. Within these spaces, complex semantics are in force, and the reciprocal contamination is reflected without erasing any of the pre-existent traditions.

The interiors of the mixed family houses are often furnished with portraits of Padre Pio and verses of the Koran; the halls of the elementary schools are decorated with research written in both Italian and Arabic; the cars of both coastal towns, where one can follow the Italian football championship, have regularly become hubs for circles of Italo-Tunisian friends. It is no coincidence that the most important Islamic place in Mazara is situated inside a garage, invisible to the outside.

The contemporary Mediterranean is now even further from its old and mythological nature, as a basin for the meeting of culture and civilisation.

The Mediterranean has in fact become a "solid sea" covered by the predetermined and rigid routes of mono-cultural and "specialised" populations: clandestine individuals, soldiers, sailors, tourists...

These routes intersect without ever actually meeting, and often do not allow their travellers any exchange of identity, dialogue or real interaction.

Nevertheless, the two urban realities of Mazara del Vallo and La Goulette (and the stretch of sea between) seem to signal that in the contemporary Mediterranean basin, crossed by ideological and religious conflicts and barriers, it is still possible to imagine the existence of not only forms of cohabitation, but also trans-national (and indeed transcontinental), socio-cultural and geographic identities.

They seem to suggest the possiblity that on the coasts of far-off countries, homogenous landscapes are realised not out of long-shared traditional and cultural legacies, but rather because they are tied to a contemporary net which is complex and continual with the flow and exchange of men, merchandise and ideas. These nets succeed in tying distant geographies and geopolitics, and connecting otherwise incommunicative routes and identities.

In this solid sea the two satellite populations of Mazara del Vallo and La Goulette have kept a breach open. They have continued to reflect one upon the other, generating characterised spaces of a reciprocal condition to the point that the two continents seem, slowly, to experiement with an unusual and genuinely unexpected form of osmosis.

In Mazara, the wave of Tunisian immigration mirrors a massive emigration in the oppposite direction, from Sicily and southern Italy to Tunisia, which ended in the 1960s.

Mohammed Beshir, fisherman

I come ferom Tunisia, near to Madia. I have been here in Mazara for fifteen years. I came here like all the toerhs, with a tourist permit and then I looked for work. Now I have fixed myself up well. My wife is here now. But she always comes and goes from Tunisia while I am always here. In summer, she is always in Tunisia.

She leaves on the first of June, until the end of Septermber: four months in Tunisia. From time to time in winter I also go there for a month. My vity had thirty thousand inhabitants. It is a small city, not a provincial capital. It is in the province of Madia. It is very close to the sea, and we are almost all fishermen. Approx forty per cent are fishermen. There is some industry, but very little of it.

Until the 1980s many Italians arrived in Madia. They have houses there. It was the Italians that took this form of fighting to Tunisia. Many people from here used to go fishing in Tunisia...they stole our fish. I have worked here for fifteen years and have managed to build myself a little house in Tunisia.

I do not want to leave my house empty and abandoned, I would like it to be open, so that it can be aired, so that there is always someone inside. And then I would like to teach our children our language, not Mazarese, I would like my children to go to school in Tunisia.

Otherwise, when we go to Tunisia, what will I do? Should I teach them Arabic? Even if I am not in Tunisia, at least I would like my family to be there, my sons, my wife and my parents. We are the Third World not the First or the Second like you...But we are Third World because Tunisia is small, but it will improve. Many Italians have invested in Tunisia and also many French and Germans...

But what counts above all, is that Tunisia will enter the EU in 2005 or 2006. The life there is exactly as yours in Europe, exactly the same. There are no differences between you and us. There are only 170 km between Tunisia and Trapani, 220 miles or let's say even 300...What difference does it make? Everything that you have in Italy we also have in Tunisia.

Do Electric Cars Dream of Fuel Engines?

Electric Cars and the Sound of the Future

The car has been, since its inception, the crossroads of a number of different ideas of human progress and technology. It is perhaps one of the most visible and popular symbols of modernity in developed countries. Yet materials and additions that remind people that the car, this avatar of modernity, of technology, of private property, of speed and class is a human construction have never been easily assimilated. Driving processes of urban change, mass production, commodification, and pollution, the car is also inseparable from ideals of private property, social distinction, mobility, and representations and feelings of personal freedom. For some consumers, it seems the image of this humanly controlled and managed power must be disassociated from the natural world, the organic. Which begs the question: what happens when we reach a point where technology, nature and human safety collide? This intersection is one the car has always occupied, yet now it is about to have a new spin added to it. Welcome to the world of meowing cars and Nissans that play film soundtracks as you leave your driveway.

Avatar of Modernity

Toshiyuki Tabata is a Nissan Motor engineer trying to make gasoline-powered cars quieter. Responding to concerns that the silence of electric and hybrid vehicles makes them unsafe, particularly for the blind, several agencies have been looking at mandating artificial sounds for vehicles. The move is particularly ironic for Tabata, Nissan’s "noise and vibration expert", who spent thirty years trying to reduce the sound of noisy engines, only to be instructed now to re-create them.

With this new agenda, he told journalists he had used the opportunity to make his engine sounds "beautiful and futuristic": the company went and consulted Japanese composers of film scores. What resulted was "a high-pitched sound reminiscent of the flying cars in Blade Runner" (and it's worth recalling that Blade Runner was a 1982 film portraying Ridley Scott's dystopian vision of 2019). But don't expect a continuous symphony while you drive: the sound system turns on automatically when the car starts and shuts off when the vehicle reaches 20 kilometres per hour, according to Tabata. Why? Suzuki Takayuki, a spokesman for the Japan Federation of the Blind, points out that at higher speeds, electric cars generate tire noise and the engines in gas-electric hybrids kick in.

Regulating Sound

Japanese regulations say cars can’t be equipped with devices that emit sounds that can be mistaken for a horn. This may or may not explain the noisemakers being developed by car electronics manufacturers. Tokyo-based Datasystem Co., for example, makes a device selling for 12,800 yen ($165) that emits sixteen different sounds including a cat’s meow, a cartoon-like “boing” and a human voice saying, “Excuse me.”

In a nice analogy, Tabata voiced concern that “There is a risk of these things sprouting up like bamboo shoots everywhere and disrupting the general noise environment.” Regulators in charge of rules and guidelines will probably have enough time to look at new systems though, given the predictions of a slow release of electric cars onto the road. The systems will increase the price tag, but Tabata believes the “beautiful” sound may help sales. “We don’t want to destroy the brand of the electric car. We want to have something that will enhance its image.”

The Sedan and the Soya Bean

The addition of beautiful sounds to electric vehicles reminded me of other human interventions in the world of engineering and technology. Attempts at innovation in technology have often been greeted with derision, as if human inventions were merely an organic, independent species best left alone. In November 1940, for example, Henry Ford struck a sedan body made of synthetic materials for a crowd of gathered journalists, demonstrating the durability of a hard plastic made from soybeans and phenolic resin. As Sylvia Katz describes it,

"(Ford) had previously laid waste to thousands of bushels of watermelons, carrots, cabbages and onions, macerating them in his search for an agricultural plastic from which he could mould an entire car...The panels of soya protein fibre were hardened with phenol-formaldehyde resin and formed in a press. Heat and pressure thermoset the panels into their unalterable shape. Ford used the salvaged oil from the soya bean in the enamel on his cars" (Plastic: Design and Materials, London: Studio Vista, 1978, pp. 21-22).

And here is Jeffrey Meikle describing the car's reception:

"The St. Louis Globe-Democrat described the new car as 'part salad and part automobile', while the Cleveland Press thought Ford should 'strengthen his plastic by adding spinach'." (American Plastic: A Cultural History, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1995, pp. 55-7).

To which those less hysterical might well have replied, "perhaps he should have."