Ulysses Syndrome: artistic gazes on the contemporary odyssey of migrants, refugees and stateless persons

Abstract

The myth of the Odyssey is eternally perpetuated in the trips and mass exoduses of refugees, fleeing from an evil Dantesque to meet another unimaginable one. The work is structured with a contextualization of the origin of the myth. Subsequently, the survival of the myth is analyzed in two films: Theo Angelopoulos with Ulysses´Gaze narrates the return of a stateless person to his particular Ithaca, a destroyed Bosnia. Winterbottom's film, In this World, tells the odyssey of an Afghan refugee on his trip to Europe. Another artistic vision is that offered by Banksy with its installation Walled Off Hotel, located next to the West Bank Wall: a border territory where the monsters of the Odyssey, Scylla and Caribdis are housed. Finally, we conclude with a comparison between exiled travelers forcibly because of geopolitics in the Middle East and with “terror tourism”.

Keywords: Odyssey, migrants, refugees, borders, Banksy.