SINCE 2014, the Mediterranean has been ranked “the deadliest sea in the world for migrants” by the International Organization for Migration and, year on year, thousands of people die in unmarked graves as they try to reach Europe via Mediterranean sea routes. Yet despite significant policy and media attention and heightened search and rescue efforts over the past few years, the annual death toll continues to rise in the face of an alarming lack of information about where and how people die at sea. Frustration at widespread acceptance of these massdrownings is identified as the explicit start-ing-point for Drift. In contemplating the urgent task to transmit the current state of emergency at Europe’s southern borders, my concern is to read the politics of Bergvall’s project in terms of what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call “deterritorialization,” a phenomenon that destabilizes the standard use of language and dislocates sound from meaning. As barriers between languages break down, the text will be shown to devise “a materially intense expression” that—as Deleuze and Guattari suggest in their seminal Kafka study—uses “syntax in order to cry, to give a syntax to the cry.” Through a series of close readings, I respond to accusations from post-colonial critics that the writings of Deleuze and Guattari are at best utopian and at worst politically naíô€‡…ve and without pur-chase on the real-life events, catastrophes, and resistances of Fortress Europe. I argue instead that the polylingual lyric voice offers a site from which to oppose the oppres-sions of majoritarian discourse where refugee voices and experience are absent. By holding forms of language to account for their forced exclusions, Bergvall will be seen to enable a Deleuzian reimagining of the world that points towards its hidden nexuses of power, interrelated networks, flows of capital, and transnational points of connection.

Drift emerged as a transnational, interdisciplinary collaboration between London- based Bergvall and the Norwegian percussionist Ingar Zach, as well as the visual artist Thomas Köppel and dramaturge Michèle Pralong, both resident in Switzerland. It pre-miered in Geneva in 2012 and was published as a book of text and drawings by Night-boat, Brooklyn, in spring 2014; further U.K. performances took place in the same year. The project works not only across media but is centrally concerned with artistic experi-mentation across languages and time. Drift employs two principal sets of intertext.