The first time I saw a ferry, I was struck by its sheer size. I remember telling my parents it looked like a huge house floating on the water. That image stayed with me, bound to an idea of shelter, of passage toward another territory, of innocent promises. Almost nineteen years later, the same image returns, but it is no longer innocent: the house still floats, but it is a prison. What was once amazement has turned into helplessness. Architecture reveals itself as a device, and flotation as a form of prolonged suspension, of enforced waiting.

Bibby Stockholm is not a dystopia, nor a scene from fiction. It does not project a future; it reactivates a past that never fully disappeared. It is the repetition of a colonial conduct that learned how to adapt, how to change its shape without losing its function. Beneath its walls, injustices have occurred and will continue to occur—always uncovered too late, once they have been absorbed into normality, once the damage has been managed and filed away. The ship thus appears as a technical solution, neutral in appearance, while reproducing a structural violence exercised far from view, floating.

Here, bodies do not arrive; they are displaced. Bodies kept far from a ground to which they might take root, far from any stable inside. Discarded bodies, abandoned bodies, bodies with a border inscribed on the skin. Bodies trapped in a logic of permanent transit, suspended between a before and an after that never fully arrives. They become available, legible, potentially exploitable according to the urgencies and delusions of a capitalist market that requires mobile, fragile, interchangeable bodies.

Language sustains this machinery. It translates lives into categories, turns experience into procedure, biography into file. Bodies become part of the transaction, and human rights are pushed aside, expelled beyond the frame, cast to the peripheries of what is named civilization. The neocolonial trace persists, not as a ruin but as an active structure, slowly oxidizing on the water. The ship floats, but it does not move, and in this enforced stillness a violence condenses—one that does not need to sink in order to keep operating.

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