Migrated Lives – Chapter I
ONGOING! CONTACT ME TO TAKE PART.
“We are all migrants, if not you, your parents, or your grandparents, great-grandparents, certainly your great-great-grandparents…”.
This statement can provoke different reactions; not everyone feels they can or want to call themselves a migrant, especially when they have spent many years in the country of arrival, may have created intercultural families and have lost most of their family and social ties with their place of origin.
Chapter I focuses on Italian women who have long migrated to Berlin. The subjects are women who have left the country where they were born and raised and have spent most of their adult lives in Germany.
The interview is an opportunity to take a journey down memory lane. Each participant has the opportunity to give space to different emotions and perhaps to recognise something new about their own experience.
The portrait is a memory of this journey and these series are a way of reflecting on migration as an enriching common ground rather than a watershed.
Angela IT->DE since 1998
For me home is Berlin. I have realised this over the last year and a half by 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
Paola IT/PL ->NL->DE since 2005
When I left, I realised I had many questions about my past, about my family’s taboos. Finding myself in an unknown environment, I felt restless, lost, rootless.
This vulnerability pushed me to look for a role model, someone with a similar story to mine, who had experienced the same problems.
I felt the desire to discover my genealogy from a female perspective, to find a role model who I felt was my root, my home.
My grandmother became a role model because of her courage.
Elettra IT->DE since 1980
First comes the euphoria, then you calm down and there is a time of great loneliness.
In that period of loneliness I went at 9 p.m. to platform 21 of the Frankfurt train station.
The Frankfurt-Palermo train left from there at that very hour.
There is a song by Lucio Dalla about it:
“Stop with your hands the Palermo-Frankfurt train
For my emotion there is a girl at the window
Green eyes that look like glass
Run and stop that train make it come back”
Delia IT->DE from 1991
“Not being at home” for me is the feeling of not being able to accept things as they are, of simply saying: that’s OK! Things are fine the way they are.
But stiffen up and look for the error: there is something wrong here! I don’t feel it! It is not my place! Be alert, fear your own error and that of others, and see that things do not come together’.
Click to: home〰️contacts〰️costs&location〰️phototherapy