ONGOING – contact me to take part to this project.

“We are all migrants , if not you, your parents, or your grandparents, the great-grandfathers, surely your great-great-grandfathers…”
This statement can create different reactions; not everyone feels that they can or want to call themselves migrants, especially when they have spent many years in their arrival country, they might have created intercultural families and have lost most of their familiar and social bonds with their place of origin.

Chapter I focuses on Italian women long-term migration in Berlin.
The subjects are women who left the country where they were born and being raised and spent most of their adult life in Germany.
The interview is an occasion to embark on a memories’ journey.
Each participant has the possibility to give different emotions a space to emerge and maybe recognising something new about her experience.
The portrait is a souvenir of this journey and these series a way to reflect on migration as an enriching common ground rather than a watershed.

Angela IT->DE since 1998
Home for me is Berlin. I realised this in the last year and half trying to spend more time in Sicily. Here I found all the space I needed to do the things I wanted to do.

“Home for me is a moment of connection.”

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Paola IT/PL ->NL->DE since 2005
As I left, I realised I had lots of questions about my past, about my family’s taboos. By being in an unknown environment I felt unsettled, lost, rootless.
This vulnerability made me looking for a role model, someone with a story similar to mine, who had experienced the same problems. I felt the desire to discover my genealogy from a feminine perspective, to find a model that felt as my root, as my home. My grandmother became a role model for her courage.

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Elettra IT->DE since 1980
First comes the euphoria, then you calm down and there is a moment of great solitude. In that period of loneliness I went at 9.00 p.m. to platform 21 of the Frankfurt train station.
The Frankfurt-Palermo train was leaving from there at that exact time.
There’s a song of Lucio Dalla talking about it:
“Stop with those hands of yours
The train from Palermo to Frankfurt
For my compassion
There is a girl at the window 
with green eyes that look like glasses
Run and stop that train
Make it turn around”

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Delia IT->DE since 1991
What does “not being at home” means to me is the feeling of not being able to accept things as they are, to simply say : That’s fine! Things are fine the way they are. But stiffen up and look for the error; something is wrong here! I don’t feel it! It is not my place! To be on the alert, to fear one’s own mistake and that of others and to see that things do not meet”