Part of the installation ‘Red Sea’, A Monument to Migration Without Bodies, Yet Full of Presence, installation, 2025.
The installation ‘Red Sea’ stands out as powerful – visually, symbolically, and emotionally. It presents a spatial tableau: a shoreline made of fine sand, covered by a translucent layer of intense red, a kind of wave or residue spilling gently over the edges. But beneath this seemingly poetic scene lies a dramatic tension: this is a landscape that evokes the bloody borders of Europe, the dangerous crossings of the sea, and symbolic terrains of loss that shape contemporary migration experiences.
What makes this work exceptional is not only the formal intensity of the red or the texture of the sand, but the presence of a literal human trace. Embedded in the sand are footprints—casts made by students who live and study in the UK but originate from other countries, many of them with migrant, immigrant, or refugee status. These imprints are not created for aesthetic effect, but as acts of grounding, materialisation, and testimony. Each footprint represents an individual who walks, exists, belongs – even if only temporarily, precariously, symbolically.
In the silence of Cope’s red sea of sand, she does not simply create a work, she shapes a spatial memory of those who have crossed. And perhaps it is precisely in its simplicity that it leaves the deepest mark.
© Jo Cope, photo’s by Gallery Velenje, Slovenia.
