Crossing borders
7 9 2016
Crossing borders

Festivaletteratura focuses on the modern-day phenomena of migration

Migration is one of contemporary society's most complex and important phenomena, even if it is often shrouded in mystery, stereotypes and prejudices. Speaking about and sharing stories around migration is critical to understanding and overcoming the almost always negative misconceptions that pervade it, generating fear and misunderstanding.

Gazmend Kapplani speaks about migration from the perspective of the migrant who finds himself crossing a border for the first time, living in a foreign country that has very little in common with the welcoming paradise that he expected. An experience that the author personally lived though as an Albanian migrant in Greece at the beginning of the 1990s.

The authors Jenny Erpenbeck and Alessandro Leogrande seek to bring a halt to judgement and give voice, albeit in a different way, to the modern day migrants who come to Europe.

The story Liberi... di dover partire – Libers... di scugnî lâ from 1964, translated into Arabic, recalls that migration is nothing new and, not too long ago, Italians were also migrants. There are numerous different aspects of migration, yet they are connected to each other, showing the complexity of the process.

Finally, the information centre on migration, open for the duration of the Festival and located in Piazza Erbe, collects information and testimonies and makes them available to visitors, answering doubts and questions from the public, allowing for the formation of a neutral as opinion as possible, which is no small feat in the current climate. The info point on migration was set up in collaboration with Open Migration, Forensic Oceanography and the Archivio Memorie dei Migranti (AMM), two projects whose aim is to describe and document the phenomenon of migration in an objective manner.