TE20 Migrant Mosaics

Immigration: The Contest

girlfriend, Ingrid, about what happened—are circumstances that cause me a pain that was only exacerbated when I watched Silvio Pérez’s special tonight. I’ve been watching the contestants’ final confessionals, which took place just before the accident. I watched them in the productioncontrol roomof The Island, nowdeserted, fromwhich we could observe everything that happened in the sea thanks to the “Eye of Europe.” I have matched the images to my previous transcriptions of their statements, and I have tried to understand to the letter the words pronounced by the living as well as the dead. If I had the emission rights, I would upload the images to this space so you could judge for yourselves, but they belong to the show’s producer, and Silvio Pérez would block the page and file a lawsuit against me. So, for the next few nights, I’m going to write down each one of their testimonies. I’ve had to substitute the visual experience for the literary media best adapted to the contestants’ confessionals, eventhough I knowtheseareno longer their voices, but rather the memory their voices have left in me. I cannot reproduce their voices, the translation is impossible. Even watching them again, I can’t bring them back; not I nor anyone else because the victims are—or were—their exclusive owners. And so, my voice is the only one you will find here. We could say this is fiction: the fiction that arises as I write my impressions of the final statements of each of the participants in my sector. I’ll start with the Kid. I’m the Kid, that’s what everyone calls me; it’s not to show off, that’s what they called me where I come from and that’s what my companions have called me since I made it onto The Island, and the audience adopted it immediately as my nickname. I want 117