There is a nation of the dispossessed. The inhabitants are both exiled and among us, in temporary cities on others’ lands, and in our cities living in shadows. Their common national traits are fear, uncertainty, seemingly permanent impermanence. Taken collectively these individuals, families and communities who live as refugees or internally displaced people number more than 60 million. If they gathered together and were recognized by the world, they would represent the 24th largest nation on Earth.
The citizens of Nation24 perish invisibly on the high seas. They live for years, sometimes decades in refugee camps, often with very little hope of returning home. They arrive from unspeakable landscapes of violence. The nature and scope of this violence is akin to a cancer that is metastasizing. The conditions they endure test the limits of human understanding. Their lives matter.
Why should we be concerned about art as it relates to refugees and migrants? Because their history and experience always seems to exist as a kind of world beneath the world. That is to say, people who endure war and deprivation often have an understanding of events that contrasts dramatically with mediated and sometimes sanitized versions of the past. It means having the ability to render a story or a gesture that would otherwise be hidden. It means discovering ways to address a hemorrhage in society that goes beyond the ephemeral nature of our news cycle.
The word “displaced” is not innocuous. For those who must endure it, displacement is most often not a singular event but a multiple uprooting repeatedly enacted. The displaced may end up crossing a border to become refugees but the geography of fear and loss lingers with them. A border may provide the possibility of certain protections – food, shelter, and physical safety. But borders cannot inure the victims of massive and repeated violence from the burden of their experience.
Soundos looks at the x-ray of her scull where a bullet is lodged in her ceribrum.
Looking for work in Za’atari camp
Za’atari Refugee Camp, August 2013. A newly arrived Syrian refugee girl walks with her baby brother towards her family tent.
47-year-old Fatimah’s husband fled ISIS and Deir ez-Zor, Syria bound for Germany. Her husband, an unskilled worker waits for her there. On about 1,000 Euro she made the entire trip to Greece with her two children. Now she is stranded on the border with Macedonia wondering about her fate. She has no money to call her husband but even in midst of her crisis there are other refugees who come to her aid. “My neighbours at the camp are in the same position as me,” she said. “But there is a family from Pakistan. They come almost everyday with a cellphone so that I can call my husband
A truamatized boy just after crossing the Syria/Jordan border
On the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya, migrants and refugees are transported to the Italian Naval vessel Greccale.
A Sudanese family just after crossing the border into South Sudan
A Sudanese boy enacts the violence he has witnessed before crossing over to Ethiopia.
A village displaced by bombing waits for assistance in Doro Camp, South Sudan.
Refugee family near Aqaba, Jordan
A young Syrian refugee boy stricken by muscular dystrophy with his sister at Za’atari camp
A young boy from Damascus pretends he is a photographer
Eidomeni camp, Greece.
A syrian refugee boy living in a tented settlement outside of Aqaba, Jordan. December 2013
A Salvadorian teenager who had fled the violence of drug gangs made it as far as the U.S. border before she was detained by Mexican authorities and returned to El Salvador. Now she worries that the local gangs will take their revenge.
two bothers pose together in a tented settlement in the Jordan valley just outside Aqaba.
Best Friends, Za’atari camp
A South Sudanese girl plays in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya
Jordanian soldiers send refugees without identificaiton back to Syria
A child from Dara’a, Syria sits on her bed after spending the night at Za’atri Registration Center 11/5/2013
Bombing victim from Damascus
Child arrival from Homs.
Soundos plays with her brother.
new arrivals from Homs crossed the border last night. some 400 many children
A boy from Dara’a Syria begs for work.Most refugee families depend upon child labor for their survival
Nasara cries as she contemplates how war has destroyed her family.
December 2013, A family from Homs, Syria has just crossed the border into Jordan.
Jungle Camp, Calais, 2015. An Ethiopian woman in Calais waits for nightfall in order to make the crossing to the U.K. For all the time and money spent bulldozing, arresting, paying police, putting up walls, video surveillance, motion detectors and razor wire, authorities could have integrated each and every man, woman and child in that camp.
