A search and rescue ship is a universe of its own, a non-place in the present time, it assails. And there, outside and inside us, many doors and windows open looking at the essentials. There is an invincible tension outwards, to search for them, to find them, towards all that water that surrounds us.

That sea, that great stretched water that knows so well the storm and the surrender. Perhaps just as that sea is the life on a ship, in the churning of distant waves and in that suspended time that collects the lives of those who have survived, crew and survivors go hand in hand.

This photographic logbook seeks to tell the story of life out at sea: lives that coexist, for a short or long time, in a confined space, forced, met and mixed, equal before the vastness of the sea.

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The migration route in the central Mediterranean remains one of the deadliest routes in the past 10 years.

NGO ships have been active since 2013, when they worked side by side with the Italian Coast Guard during the national search and rescue operation Mare Nostrum, launched after the massive Lampedusa shipwreck. Over the years, however, this collaboration has turned into an undeclared clash.

European policies since the Lampedusa shipwreck in 2013 have sought to stem the flow of migration at the expense of human lives crossing the sea.