In “One Wall, Two Seas”, a novella set in Tangier, Driss Ksikes, a Moroccan journalist—who is also a novelist, playwright, and activist—writes: “Inevitably, to cap it all, history stutters on a daily basis”. Referring to the recurrent aspirations of many Moroccans of crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, Ksikes evokes a sense of “historical stuttering”, what might be understood as a non-linear interpretation of history, a history marked by gaps, holes, and absence. This paper examines various artistic iterations of “historical stuttering” through the works of visual artists, Kader Attia and Yto Barrada, both of whom draw their creativity from a fractured Mediterranean consciousness. Both rely on multiple mediums, their work using overlapping techniques of painting, photography, writing, music and installation, effectively bringing to light those very breaks and silences in contemporary historical narratives of the Mediterranean. I examine the ways in which Attia and Barrada confront current emigration in the Mediterranean- a Russian roulette modality of risking it all- that is, I suggest, powered by images and driven by symbols. I explore the agonistic role of visual arts in a distinct geographical space and specific historical time; that is the conjuncture of contemporary Maghrebi-Mediterranean crossings and their images. To try to capture the historical moment of emigration in today’s current context is often to reduce a highly complicated set of conditions to an image, and insodoing divests it of the plurality of contexts in which it is generated. The emigrating subject lives in a state of manipulation, driven by the lure of the simulacrum, by the idea of a place that is only partially “real” if it is real at all, an Eldorado, as it is now ubiquitously termed. Through their multimedial works Attia and Barrada call into question the extreme disconnect between viewer and image, waging a powerful critique of the abstraction of the real that pervades today’s representation of emigration in the Mediterranean. Their works stutter, shock and interrupt those histories that are regularly transformed into internet memes of drowned refugees and Instagram trophies. The viewer, an ‘embodied spectator’ (Marks), is driven to fill in what lies in those empty spaces, in those gaps which highlight both our inability to see and the aporetic nature of representation itself. Ultimately, Attia and Barrada’s palimpsestic approaches form a ‘migratory aesthetics’ (Bal) that signal the necessity of a multidisciplinary interpretive framework when dealing with the contemporary Mediterranean.