A extended journey where internal and external come together
“Internal European borders will be opened, yes, but external ones will be closed when people in despair run from wars, epidemics and poverty.”
A traditional photo book was not enough to tell the stories and the situations that Carlos Spottorno and Guillermo Abril saw during their reportage around the borders of Europe. In order to expose what we are trying not to see, sincerity and immediateness are as necessary as oxygen.
The aim of the book is to reach most of the public and give a sense of urgency of the topic. It succeeds in this goal thanks to a simple, straightforward and symbolic language, based on drawing-like photographs, showing us all of the cracks that are emerging on the European continent.
Migration is what shapes the changes that naturally occurs in our world. We often think of borders as lines on a map but borders are actually made with walls and towers, guarded by soldiers. And if you dig under those borders what you’re going to find are the contradictions of our world, present and past. When you find yourself along a frontier, you do not see peace nor glory.
A nation’s border is like a nation’s skin colliding with another one. We don’t see wars there but the origin of them, back to the most ancient one. This book sums up most of Spottorno and Abril’s work and how particularly important and current it is, given the current inability to understand the migratory phenomenon in modern states.
The book begins with the announcement of the creation of the European Union yet ends with the possibility of another world war. Abril says that the warnings - the symptoms of a renaissance of violence - are right under our eyes and maybe for us to recognise this, we should always try to “feel like a stranger” in the words of an audience member, asking a question at the end of the event.