“Living Realities” is a transdisciplinary art project, that brings the contemporary living realities of refugees in European countries into the center of attention. The core of the project is the photography exhibition “Passages of a flight”, which is based on a book by the same name. Photographer Simon van Hal and journalist and translater Nermin Ismail accompanied people on “passages of their flight” – people who fled war and crossed borders in search for a new home and a new life. For meeting these people they have traveled to Hungary, Slovenia, Austria and Germany as well as to Greece and Turkey. Starting with the events in Syria, coming through Greece and stopping at the boarders, different people raised their voice and shared a glance on their fates. The exhibition will be realized in Austria (Brunnenpassage / Dschungel Wien), Czech Republic (Studio Alta) and Greece (Impact Hub Athens) and aims to bring the stories and photographs of the people portrayed to a wider public than the book itself could. Participative photography workshops, theatre, music and dance performances, discussion rounds and small artistic gatherings will form part of the frame work program, aiming to enable encounters, open a room for discourse and scale up social solidarity and cohesion. The realization of this transnational cooperation by the help of EU funding also aims to relate the individual perspective of refugees, travelling throughout countries in search for a better life, to a transnational perspective of how these people are treated and welcomed differently in each of these European countries. The collaboration between institutions in these specific countries – Greece as one of the main entrance countries to the EU, Czech Republic with it’s restrictive and conservative asylum policy and a low number of asylum applications as well as Austria with a high density of asylum applications – will enable a unique and multifaceted perspective.
