dal Sito TRACING MOVEMENTS
TRACING MOVEMENTS is a collaborative audio-visual research, documenting political resistance against a Europe which tirelessly attempts to stop, filter, select and control the movement of people across and within its borders.
As activists and film-makers, we wanted to understand and document how these mechanisms of control work, and how they are lived and resisted. During the summer of 2011, we traveled across Greece, Bulgaria and Italy where we met groups actively fighting against the policies, discourses and values that produce this system of border and migration control in Europe.
We toured with a mobile cinema unit and documented these struggles and the context in which they have arisen. This method of meeting and exchanging experiences through film and debate was the basis for the audio-visual material we gathered.
The project will culminate in an online story-space/documentary within the next year. This blog is a first platform for testing, exploring and sharing ideas, stories, pictures and film clips from our visual research so far.
PATRA – IN LIMBO AT THE GATES OF EUROPE
Patra is one of Greek’s main ports on the Adriatic sea, a few hundred kilometres west is the Italian coast. For the last fifteen years, migrants have come to Patra because it is an exit gate, the last port of call for those hoping to carry on their journey to Western Europe.
Kurdish migrants began arriving in 1997, taking shelter in abandoned train wagons and containers near the port, and by 1998 a makeshift camp had begun to grow in Agyia in northern Patra, housing up to 1,800 people from different nationalities, many from Afghanistan. During this time, a number of local activist groups began to rally in solidarity with migrants’ struggles. However, in July 2009, the camp was violently ‘cleared’ by the authorities.
Since the camp’s destruction, the situation for migrants has become increasingly precarious. The state and town authorities’ position is clear; adhering to the Dublin II Convention which seeks to keep that gate firmly closed, and unwilling to give migrants equal status within Greek society, it results to cyclical patterns of persecution and violence which aim to drive migrants underground, to make them invisible and keep them out of the sight of residents and tourists who flock the city in the summer months.
“The police beat us, the fascists beat us. We are stuck, unable to go backwards or forwards”.
Whilst the terrace cafés are laid out for the season’s visitors, the wastelands of the town are used as shelters by undocumented people attempting to built a temporary base and avoid persecution. On a daily basis the streets near the port are patrolled by private and port security forces. Migrants are rounded-up and beaten, and squatted areas are targeted for eviction.
With neither opportunities for settling in Greece nor a way of making their onward journeys, migrants find themselves in a limbo where they endure daily physical and psychological violence.
“We want to leave. In Greece, even for Greeks life is difficult, there are many problems with work. Why do they make us stay?”
Deemed ‘illegal’ and denied all rights by the state, their ability to resist and fight back these constant attacks is also massively restricted. At the same time, those residents of the town who are still trying to organise with migrants are faced with the complexities of trying to support a transient stream of people whose precarious and vulnerable legal status makes it hard for them to be visible. Attempts at self-organising and collaboration amongst different groups are still evolving and it remains to be seen what new routes of resistance will emerge in the face of an increasingly right-wing political and social backdrop.
IOANNINA – EMERGING SOLIDARITIES
In December 2010, a group of 35 Senegalese and Pakistani migrant workers appeared in front of the Prefecture of Ioannina, a small city in the North West of Greece. Their intention was to begin a hunger strike that demanded the authorities take action against their employer, the owner of a large tomato plantation who had not paid them for months of work and was withholding 65.000 EUR worth of wages.
The workers had started their struggle at the plantation some months earlier, by downing their tools and putting pressure on the boss. The owner refused to collaborate, tried to pay them with fake cheques and eventually packed up and left the country when the pressure got too much.
Stuck at the plantation, in the remote village of Kalpaki, with local authorities refusing to help, the workers had no choice but to head to the capital of the county. They camped outside the Prefecture and refused to leave until they received justice, carrying out a 12 day hunger strike in full public view.
The Kalpaki workers hunger strike has served as a backdrop for the emergence of a strong network of personal and political solidarity that is now firmly established in the city. Responses to the strike by autonomous political groups, students and other migrants who are in a similar situations were constant and sustained:
“The amount we gained from this struggle was nothing next to the experience and the cooperation that we had with people. Because before that, if you went out you were pointed out as an alien. You felt each day you were made a fool. But thanks to this struggle, people took us for people with a will and a motivation to fight. We have quite a lot of friends, with the same ideology as us. Each time we try to meet, evaluate…if there’s problems with other immigrants.. we go down there, we do marches… It was the strike that gave us this…” (Senegalese hunger striker)
Since the strike relationships and discourses about how to organise together have continued to develop between migrants and local groups, creating a network of support and political action that aims to find common ground and attack the systems that sustain racism and xenophobia in the area.
“We want to move away from mere sloganism and actually engage in a relationship with people who are migrating, in a way that has an impact on them and on us, and in turn begins to show in the local society…To work with migrants on issues that concern both their and our everyday life. So that they come out of the sphere of invisibility and they become visible, as equals with opinion and positions, and to claim rights… For us the development of relationships leads to a practical negation of racism.”
CRETE- A HISTORY OF STRUGGLE
The island of Crete is mostly known as an international tourist destination. The summer here is big business with around 3.000.000 tourists flooding the island each year, bringing plenty of disposable income with them.
Chania is not only the capital, it is also one of two important ports on the island- a main entrance and exit point for tourists and thus a significant landmark on the tourist industry’s map.
As most of Greece’s re-development in recent years, the infrastructure and service industry that support tourism in Chania have been, to a large extent, constructed and staffed by uninsured, migrant labour. In a country where obtaining legal papers for migrants is almost impossible, growing industries like tourism have greatly benefited from the existence of undocumented and uninsured people who can act as cheap workforce.
Legalisation therefore is a main concern for the thousands of migrants living and working in Chania. Since 2008, two mass hunger strike actions have been organised from here. The most recent one in 2010, with 300 people participating from all over Greece to demand legalisation and freedom of movements for all migrants. The hunger strike lasted 43 days and put significant pressure on the Greek government to meet some of the migrants’ demands.
In the context of the current climate of economic crisis and the past experiences of struggles for rights and legalisation, the migrant community in Crete is emerging as one of the most politicised and active communities in the movement for migrant rights.
SOUTH ITALY – THE INVISIBLE WORKFORCE
In the agricultural zones of southern Italy, undocumented migrants move from one region to another, following the harvests in search of work. In August and September, the fields are dotted with tomato pickers. Segregated from Italian society, the non-European workers stay in abandoned houses among the fields.
“Before migrant workers it was local people who worked the land… When the agricultural workers unionised, they were fighting for labourers’ rights but also for the right to the land… Now we have gone back to pre-industrial era in terms of working conditions”.
The temporary nature of seasonal work and the urgent need for a wage however small make organised resistance difficult, as the strike in the tomato fields of Nardo showed. After several weeks and the harvest over, the strikers went onwards empty-handed.
However, in the disregarded and mafia-controlled town of Castel Volturno, migrants workers have formed an assembly to defend their rights. A town with a large migrant community, it’s a base for seasonal workers at times when they are not working in the fields.
“People are coming here to Castel Volturno because they can survive… And I think the system also needs a place like this. When you have an enclave, a ghetto, of people with no rights, with no documents, the economy runs fast”.
The assembly is an important means of discussing and voicing common problems. The experiences of exploitative working conditions, racism and the precarity of living without papers are often raised. Their first aim is to campaign to get documents.
“Without documents, you can’t express yourself. They shout “documents” and you have to keep quiet… You have to keep your mouth shut because you don’t have any rights.”
THE MILITARISATION OF THE E.U. BORDER
In recent years, the south-eastern borders of the European Union have become increasingly militarised. Both on the E.U. side in Greece and Bulgaria as well as on the Turkish side, high-security detention centres and prison-like “reception centres” for migrants have been multiplying, along with an increase in the number of border staff, surveillance towers, new military and biometric technologies, and the presence of FRONTEX, the European Border Agency.
In response to this push towards the criminalisation of migrants, people from different parts of Europe gathered for a protest camp in the Bulgarian village of Siva Reka. A demonstration was held outside the newly-built detention centre of Luybimets.
“It’s a centre that opened at the beginning of this year, and it’s where people caught at the Turkish and Greek border are detained. We are doing this action in solidarity with those inside, and to send a clear message to public opinion and to the locals that we are against the imprisonment of migrants, and especially against the modernisation of this border regime.”
On the other side of the border in the town of Orestiada in Greece, a local group has come together to raise-awareness about the situation faced by migrants in the region. Anti-migrant propaganda is deeply entrenched, particularly in the last years as more and more migrants have been passing through the region to enter Europe.
“It’s a circle, a chain of things, a phenomenon of humanity that has always existed. It’s not something new, but now that it has intensified, it’s a bit like a truth that has come to our door and we want to turn it away. We don’t want to accept it because it’s not in our interest, or it could possibly alter our way of life a little bit”.
The practice of ‘fencing off’ territories also feeds nationalist rhetorics and fears of the ‘other’. The decision of the Greek government to construct a wall along the 12 kilometer land border between Greece and Turkey is a strong symbolic message against immigration, more than an attempt to physically stop people from entering the E.U.
SOUTH ITALY – THE INVISIBLE WORKFORCE
In the agricultural zones of southern Italy, undocumented migrants move from one region to another, following the harvests in search of work. In August and September, the fields are dotted with tomato pickers. Segregated from Italian society, the non-European workers stay in abandoned houses among the fields.
“Before migrant workers it was local people who worked the land… When the agricultural workers unionised, they were fighting for labourers’ rights but also for the right to the land… Now we have gone back to pre-industrial era in terms of working conditions”.
The temporary nature of seasonal work and the urgent need for a wage however small make organised resistance difficult, as the strike in the tomato fields of Nardo showed. After several weeks and the harvest over, the strikers went onwards empty-handed.
However, in the disregarded and mafia-controlled town of Castel Volturno, migrants workers have formed an assembly to defend their rights. A town with a large migrant community, it’s a base for seasonal workers at times when they are not working in the fields.
“People are coming here to Castel Volturno because they can survive… And I think the system also needs a place like this. When you have an enclave, a ghetto, of people with no rights, with no documents, the economy runs fast”.
The assembly is an important means of discussing and voicing common problems. The experiences of exploitative working conditions, racism and the precarity of living without papers are often raised. Their first aim is to campaign to get documents.
“Without documents, you can’t express yourself. They shout “documents” and you have to keep quiet… You have to keep your mouth shut because you don’t have any rights.”
TRACING MOVEMENTS is a collaborative audio-visual research, documenting political resistance against a Europe which tirelessly attempts to stop, filter, select and control the movement of people across and within its borders.
As activists and film-makers, we wanted to understand and document how these mechanisms of control work, and how they are lived and resisted. During the summer of 2011, we traveled across Greece, Bulgaria and Italy where we met groups actively fighting against the policies, discourses and values that produce this system of border and migration control in Europe.
We toured with a mobile cinema unit and documented these struggles and the context in which they have arisen. This method of meeting and exchanging experiences through film and debate was the basis for the audio-visual material we gathered.
The project will culminate in an online story-space/documentary within the next year. This blog is a first platform for testing, exploring and sharing ideas, stories, pictures and film clips from our visual research so far.
PATRA – IN LIMBO AT THE GATES OF EUROPE
Patra is one of Greek’s main ports on the Adriatic sea, a few hundred kilometres west is the Italian coast. For the last fifteen years, migrants have come to Patra because it is an exit gate, the last port of call for those hoping to carry on their journey to Western Europe.
Kurdish migrants began arriving in 1997, taking shelter in abandoned train wagons and containers near the port, and by 1998 a makeshift camp had begun to grow in Agyia in northern Patra, housing up to 1,800 people from different nationalities, many from Afghanistan. During this time, a number of local activist groups began to rally in solidarity with migrants’ struggles. However, in July 2009, the camp was violently ‘cleared’ by the authorities.
Since the camp’s destruction, the situation for migrants has become increasingly precarious. The state and town authorities’ position is clear; adhering to the Dublin II Convention which seeks to keep that gate firmly closed, and unwilling to give migrants equal status within Greek society, it results to cyclical patterns of persecution and violence which aim to drive migrants underground, to make them invisible and keep them out of the sight of residents and tourists who flock the city in the summer months.
“The police beat us, the fascists beat us. We are stuck, unable to go backwards or forwards”.
Whilst the terrace cafés are laid out for the season’s visitors, the wastelands of the town are used as shelters by undocumented people attempting to built a temporary base and avoid persecution. On a daily basis the streets near the port are patrolled by private and port security forces. Migrants are rounded-up and beaten, and squatted areas are targeted for eviction.
With neither opportunities for settling in Greece nor a way of making their onward journeys, migrants find themselves in a limbo where they endure daily physical and psychological violence.
“We want to leave. In Greece, even for Greeks life is difficult, there are many problems with work. Why do they make us stay?”
Deemed ‘illegal’ and denied all rights by the state, their ability to resist and fight back these constant attacks is also massively restricted. At the same time, those residents of the town who are still trying to organise with migrants are faced with the complexities of trying to support a transient stream of people whose precarious and vulnerable legal status makes it hard for them to be visible. Attempts at self-organising and collaboration amongst different groups are still evolving and it remains to be seen what new routes of resistance will emerge in the face of an increasingly right-wing political and social backdrop.
IOANNINA – EMERGING SOLIDARITIES
In December 2010, a group of 35 Senegalese and Pakistani migrant workers appeared in front of the Prefecture of Ioannina, a small city in the North West of Greece. Their intention was to begin a hunger strike that demanded the authorities take action against their employer, the owner of a large tomato plantation who had not paid them for months of work and was withholding 65.000 EUR worth of wages.
The workers had started their struggle at the plantation some months earlier, by downing their tools and putting pressure on the boss. The owner refused to collaborate, tried to pay them with fake cheques and eventually packed up and left the country when the pressure got too much.
Stuck at the plantation, in the remote village of Kalpaki, with local authorities refusing to help, the workers had no choice but to head to the capital of the county. They camped outside the Prefecture and refused to leave until they received justice, carrying out a 12 day hunger strike in full public view.
The Kalpaki workers hunger strike has served as a backdrop for the emergence of a strong network of personal and political solidarity that is now firmly established in the city. Responses to the strike by autonomous political groups, students and other migrants who are in a similar situations were constant and sustained:
“The amount we gained from this struggle was nothing next to the experience and the cooperation that we had with people. Because before that, if you went out you were pointed out as an alien. You felt each day you were made a fool. But thanks to this struggle, people took us for people with a will and a motivation to fight. We have quite a lot of friends, with the same ideology as us. Each time we try to meet, evaluate…if there’s problems with other immigrants.. we go down there, we do marches… It was the strike that gave us this…” (Senegalese hunger striker)
Since the strike relationships and discourses about how to organise together have continued to develop between migrants and local groups, creating a network of support and political action that aims to find common ground and attack the systems that sustain racism and xenophobia in the area.
“We want to move away from mere sloganism and actually engage in a relationship with people who are migrating, in a way that has an impact on them and on us, and in turn begins to show in the local society…To work with migrants on issues that concern both their and our everyday life. So that they come out of the sphere of invisibility and they become visible, as equals with opinion and positions, and to claim rights… For us the development of relationships leads to a practical negation of racism.”
CRETE- A HISTORY OF STRUGGLE
The island of Crete is mostly known as an international tourist destination. The summer here is big business with around 3.000.000 tourists flooding the island each year, bringing plenty of disposable income with them.
Chania is not only the capital, it is also one of two important ports on the island- a main entrance and exit point for tourists and thus a significant landmark on the tourist industry’s map.
As most of Greece’s re-development in recent years, the infrastructure and service industry that support tourism in Chania have been, to a large extent, constructed and staffed by uninsured, migrant labour. In a country where obtaining legal papers for migrants is almost impossible, growing industries like tourism have greatly benefited from the existence of undocumented and uninsured people who can act as cheap workforce.
Legalisation therefore is a main concern for the thousands of migrants living and working in Chania. Since 2008, two mass hunger strike actions have been organised from here. The most recent one in 2010, with 300 people participating from all over Greece to demand legalisation and freedom of movements for all migrants. The hunger strike lasted 43 days and put significant pressure on the Greek government to meet some of the migrants’ demands.
In the context of the current climate of economic crisis and the past experiences of struggles for rights and legalisation, the migrant community in Crete is emerging as one of the most politicised and active communities in the movement for migrant rights.
SOUTH ITALY – THE INVISIBLE WORKFORCE
In the agricultural zones of southern Italy, undocumented migrants move from one region to another, following the harvests in search of work. In August and September, the fields are dotted with tomato pickers. Segregated from Italian society, the non-European workers stay in abandoned houses among the fields.
“Before migrant workers it was local people who worked the land… When the agricultural workers unionised, they were fighting for labourers’ rights but also for the right to the land… Now we have gone back to pre-industrial era in terms of working conditions”.
The temporary nature of seasonal work and the urgent need for a wage however small make organised resistance difficult, as the strike in the tomato fields of Nardo showed. After several weeks and the harvest over, the strikers went onwards empty-handed.
However, in the disregarded and mafia-controlled town of Castel Volturno, migrants workers have formed an assembly to defend their rights. A town with a large migrant community, it’s a base for seasonal workers at times when they are not working in the fields.
“People are coming here to Castel Volturno because they can survive… And I think the system also needs a place like this. When you have an enclave, a ghetto, of people with no rights, with no documents, the economy runs fast”.
The assembly is an important means of discussing and voicing common problems. The experiences of exploitative working conditions, racism and the precarity of living without papers are often raised. Their first aim is to campaign to get documents.
“Without documents, you can’t express yourself. They shout “documents” and you have to keep quiet… You have to keep your mouth shut because you don’t have any rights.”
THE MILITARISATION OF THE E.U. BORDER
In recent years, the south-eastern borders of the European Union have become increasingly militarised. Both on the E.U. side in Greece and Bulgaria as well as on the Turkish side, high-security detention centres and prison-like “reception centres” for migrants have been multiplying, along with an increase in the number of border staff, surveillance towers, new military and biometric technologies, and the presence of FRONTEX, the European Border Agency.
In response to this push towards the criminalisation of migrants, people from different parts of Europe gathered for a protest camp in the Bulgarian village of Siva Reka. A demonstration was held outside the newly-built detention centre of Luybimets.
“It’s a centre that opened at the beginning of this year, and it’s where people caught at the Turkish and Greek border are detained. We are doing this action in solidarity with those inside, and to send a clear message to public opinion and to the locals that we are against the imprisonment of migrants, and especially against the modernisation of this border regime.”
On the other side of the border in the town of Orestiada in Greece, a local group has come together to raise-awareness about the situation faced by migrants in the region. Anti-migrant propaganda is deeply entrenched, particularly in the last years as more and more migrants have been passing through the region to enter Europe.
“It’s a circle, a chain of things, a phenomenon of humanity that has always existed. It’s not something new, but now that it has intensified, it’s a bit like a truth that has come to our door and we want to turn it away. We don’t want to accept it because it’s not in our interest, or it could possibly alter our way of life a little bit”.
The practice of ‘fencing off’ territories also feeds nationalist rhetorics and fears of the ‘other’. The decision of the Greek government to construct a wall along the 12 kilometer land border between Greece and Turkey is a strong symbolic message against immigration, more than an attempt to physically stop people from entering the E.U.
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