The Balkan Route – Them, photo essay by Valeria Gradizzi

Millions of people fleeing from their homes, forced to flee from war and persecution scenarios, looking only for freedom. With the certainty that in Europe, a value like freedom is easy to reach.

But Europe awaits them, disappoint them, raise the corner of the mat and tries to hide everything, with sometimes violent methods. Rise the walls, to delimit an inside and outside, without having well understood, who has the right to stay in and who out. A Europe ranking, this immense migration as a problem of public order, a sorting problem and not as a serious problem, which instead appears. “THEM”, just as we perceive them through the media. Migrants, people far from us, different, with whom willingly or unconsciously we can not identify ourselves. With Their problems and basic needs, fenced behind a complicated network of fears. We have heard many cries, saw many images that have taken my breath away, images of pain and disease. It can tell in another way, without invading with a camera, those shy glimpses of dignity, built by living with thousand of strangers, behind a fence. You can tell whispering, by starting a wireless phone that you do not see the end.

(by Valeria Gradizzi)