Two days ago, around 900 people died at sea.

They were victims of… what, exactly? Fleeing from where, exactly?

• War
• Structural poverty
• Political chaos
• Histories of colonialism
• Histories of submission
• The way in which global capital does and does not enter territories
• The 20th century
• The 21st century
• No future

It was put to me, by a haughty German artist in his 70s, wearer of a haughty moustache, that the flow of migrant desire from the Middle East and Africa towards Europe is proof that Europe is still, in the symbolic imagination, a superior place, a horizon of aspiration. And that any thesis that diagnoses the ‘end of the West’ should reconsider it in light of migrants’ flights.

I could not wait to exit this conversation.

His diagnosis is too simple.

I do not wish to poeticise what is, in the simplest of human terms, an ongoing tragedy of epic proportions…