UNITED4RESCUE | DROWNED REQUIEM | 2020
Europe's Ideal Sinks to the Bottom of the Sea / UNITED4RESCUE "DROWNED REQUIEM"
Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" plays as a requiem on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea. A symbol of Europe rings out over the graves of refugees. In 2020, while everyone's attention was on COVID and Trump, people were still drowning at sea. A German citizens' group sank the song Europe holds dearest into the ocean.
The problem
Since 2014, more than 20,000 refugees have drowned in the Mediterranean. The EU closed its borders and stopped fulfilling its duty to rescue people at sea—despite treaties that promised humanitarian values. UNITED4RESCUE is a citizens' alliance formed in 2019, centered around the Evangelical Church in Germany.
The insight
"Ode to Joy" is the song the EU chose as a symbol of freedom and solidarity. Turning it into a requiem and performing it on the very seabed where refugees sank forces the ideal to confront the reality it abandoned—in the exact place that ideal was declared.
The idea
The performance was by Between Music, a Danish performance group. Normally they perform inside water tanks, so filming in the Mediterranean was a first for them. They developed special underwater instruments to make sound on the seafloor. "Ode to Joy" gradually transforms into a suffocating requiem—and that suffocation is the closest thing to the feeling of drowning.
What happened
The video was heavily targeted at the government districts from Brussels to Berlin. Citizens emailed the EU Commission President, reminding her of the treaty's obligations. The donations raised made it possible to prepare a new rescue ship in a short time.
Afterthought
If politics won't make rescue its job, citizens have to do it themselves. Every time one person dies at sea, Europe's values sink along with them—that's what one of the founding members said, and it became the campaign itself. It didn't just grab attention, and it didn't just raise donations. It managed to do both.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Gold 2020
