Privacy International leads a panel on the surveillance technology industry to mark the launch of a report on the sale of surveillance technologies to Central Asian governments.
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Enabling Repression, Exporting Surveillance, and Silencing Dissent
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Documenting the Human Cost of U.S. Immigration Policy
Photographer Brandon Thibodeaux discusses his visit to the Texas–Mexico border region to document the growing human cost of U.S. immigration policy.
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Young Photographers Bring Post-Earthquake Haiti into Focus
Five years after Port-au-Prince was devastated, a new photography book documents one of its most famous streets.
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Amid Occupation, Life Goes On for Palestinians
Photographer Tanya Habjouqa’s pictures of Palestinian life reveal a world that’s far more diverse than the news would have you believe.
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Five Photographers Present Journeys Toward Freedom, Safety, and Self-Determination
From the creative act of authorship to the formidable journey to escape slavery, the stories highlighted in the next installment of the Moving Walls photography series explore people in pursuit of new worlds.
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Exiled to Nowhere: Discussions on Intolerance and Inclusion in Burma
As part of the global tour of the photography exhibition Exiled to Nowhere: Burma’s Rohingya, this discussion focuses on the challenges and intolerance facing ethnic minorities in Burma.
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Targeted: A Conversation with Artists Hasan Elahi and Josh Begley
Join us for an artist talk with Hasan Elahi and Josh Begley, who use their art to reflect on post-9/11 racial profiling and surveillance culture.
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Enabling Repression, Exporting Surveillance, and Silencing Dissent
Privacy International leads a panel on the surveillance technology industry to mark the launch of a report on the sale of surveillance technologies to Central Asian governments.
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Young Photographers Bring Post-Earthquake Haiti into Focus
Five years after Port-au-Prince was devastated, a new photography book documents one of its most famous streets.
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Amid Occupation, Life Goes On for Palestinians
Photographer Tanya Habjouqa’s pictures of Palestinian life reveal a world that’s far more diverse than the news would have you believe.
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Five Photographers Present Journeys Toward Freedom, Safety, and Self-Determination
From the creative act of authorship to the formidable journey to escape slavery, the stories highlighted in the next installment of the Moving Walls photography series explore people in pursuit of new worlds.
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Exiled to Nowhere: Discussions on Intolerance and Inclusion in Burma
As part of the global tour of the photography exhibition Exiled to Nowhere: Burma’s Rohingya, this discussion focuses on the challenges and intolerance facing ethnic minorities in Burma.
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Brooklyn Outdoor Exhibit Features Two Open Society Photographers
A Brooklyn photography festival features immersive installations about U.S. Superfund sites and Nigerian romance novelists.
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The Role of Arts & Culture in an Open Society
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The Role of Arts and Culture in an Open Society
By supporting artistic endeavors, we help make manifest our most ambitious goals and ideals.
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Opening Reception for Moving Walls 23: Journeys
Moving Walls 23: Journeys is an exhibition that highlights the spaces—both physical and psychological—inhabited by people pursuing freedom, security, and a more self-determined future.
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From Darkness to Light: Seeking Freedom on the Underground Railroad
20151021-michnabales-mw23-collection-001
Follow the Drinking Gourd
Jefferson County, Indiana, United States, 2013
“For the old man is a-waiting for to carry you to freedom / If you follow the drinking gourd.”
—lyrics from a spiritual gospel about the Big Dipper, which points to the North Star
© Jeanine Michna-Bales
20151021-michnabales-mw23-collection-002
Hidden Passageway
Mammoth Cave, Barren County, Kentucky, United States, 2014
The Mammoth Cave system is the longest-known cave network in the world and was explored in the mid-19th century by Stephen Bishop, a man enslaved by the owners of the land, who gave guided tours of the caves. Bishop’s wife and son were sold away from him, and yet the fact that he remained at the cave has led some to speculate whether it was to help others who were attempting to escape slavery. At the start of their trip and along the way, those seeking freedom were at times guided by family members and other enslaved people.
© Jeanine Michna-Bales
20151021-michnabales-mw23-collection-003
Decision to Leave
A building on Magnolia Plantation by the Cane River in Louisiana, United States, 2013
“They worked me all de day / Widout one cent of pay / So I took my flight in the middle ob de night / When de moon am gone away.”
—chorus of a song from abolitionist George W. Clark’s The Liberty Minstrel (1844)
At the height of its cotton production in the mid-19th century, Magnolia Plantation used the forced labor of over 250 enslaved men, women, and children.
© Jeanine Michna-Bales
20151021-michnabales-mw23-collection-004
Cypress Swamp
Middle Mississippi, United States, 2014
The Natchez Trace was a well-traveled trail by the mid-19th century. A freedom seeker might roughly follow its path leading north from Mississippi to Tennessee, while also staying safe by remaining unseen in the surrounding swamp areas.
© Jeanine Michna-Bales
20151021-michnabales-mw23-collection-005
Look for the Grey Barn Out Back
An Underground Railroad station with a tunnel leading to another conductor’s house in Centerville, Indiana, United States, 2013
Underground Railroad “conductors” were guides who led fugitives out of slave states and/or aided them through free states.
© Jeanine Michna-Bales
20151021-michnabales-mw23-collection-006
Hunter’s Bottom
Trees near the banks of the Ohio River, outside Madison, Indiana, United States, 2014
“After dark I drove to the place agreed upon to meet in a piece of woods one mile from the town of Wirt. I had been at the appointed place but a very short time when Mr. DeBaptiste sang out, ‘Here is $10,000 from Hunter’s Bottom tonight.’ A good negro at that time would fetch from $1,000 up. We loaded them in … and started with the cargo of human charges towards the North Star.”
—excerpt from Reminiscences of Slavery Times (1888), an unpublished chronicle by abolitionist John H. Tibbets, recounting his first encounter with the Underground Railroad after moving to Indiana
George DeBaptiste was a prominent African American abolitionist born to free parents in 1815. Among a lifetime of acts dedicated to anti-slavery, he is said to have briefly used boats on the Ohio River, and later on the Detroit River, to secretly usher enslaved people further in their journeys toward freedom.
© Jeanine Michna-Bales
20151021-michnabales-mw23-collection-007
A Brief Respite
Abolitionist William Beard’s home in Union County, Indiana, United States, 2014
William Beard was a white abolitionist who is said to have contributed to the Underground Railroad in collaboration with prominent advocate Levi Coffin and the Henry County Female Anti-Slavery Society.
© Jeanine Michna-Bales
20151021-michnabales-mw23-collection-008
The River Jordan
Crossing the Ohio River to Indiana, United States, 2014
The Ohio River provided one pathway to freedom, but people resisting enslavement did not all travel the same path: some, especially those in the Upper South, traveled toward northern U.S. states or to Canada; others in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas could escape north into Indian Territory; some traveled west toward the frontier or south to Mexico; while others formed maroon communities, organized enclaves that were established—at times not far from the plantations they fled—in dense forests, bayous, swamps, or Indian territories.
© Jeanine Michna-Bales
20151021-michnabales-mw23-collection-009
The Beacon Tree
Spring Hill Farm, Macomb County, Michigan, United States, 2014
The husband and wife who owned Spring Hill Farm in the late 19th century arranged to have a massive cedar tree on their property uprooted and planted on top of a hill. From there the tree could be seen from a great distance and became known as “the beacon tree.” Although the original tree no longer stands, this image imagines that landmark—and others like it—created to be used as secret reference points for those pursuing freedom along the Underground Railroad.
© Jeanine Michna-Bales
20151021-michnabales-mw23-collection-010
Determining True North in the Rain
Along the southern part of the Old Natchez Trace in Mississippi, United States, 2014
Some sources say that one of the many navigational clues used by people seeking to escape slavery and head north was that moss grew on the northern side of trees.
© Jeanine Michna-Bales
Jeanine Michna-Bales
Jeanine Michna-Bales’s (American, b. 1971) work explores the relationships between what has occurred or is occurring in a society, and how people have chosen to react to those events. Michna-Bales meticulously researches each topic—considering different viewpoints, causes and effects, and political climates—and often incorporates found or archival text and audio.
Whether exploring the darkened stations along the Underground Railroad, long-forgotten nuclear fallout shelters, or the invisible epicenters of environmental turmoil, her work seeks out places that are hidden in plain sight.
Images from her series about the Underground Railroad have appeared in group shows around the United States, including Southern Exposure: Portraits of a Changing Landscape at the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, and have been published by GEO Histoire, Harvard University’s Transition magazine, and WIRED Raw File. In 2014, she was named to the Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50. Her forthcoming book, Through Darkness to Light, will be published by Princeton Architectural Press in February 2017.
Artist Statement
Jeanine Michna-Bales
In the 19th century, an estimated 50,000 enslaved African American men, women, and children embarked on the journey to escape bondage every year. Taking great risks, they moved in constant fear of being discovered. Some were killed, while most were captured—or returned on their own—and severely beaten as an example of what would happen to others who might choose to flee.
These “fugitives” carefully planned their escapes and displayed a great deal of resourcefulness, fortitude, and ingenuity. Occasionally, they were guided from one secret location to the next by an ever-changing, clandestine group of anti-slavery advocates—which included free blacks, successful former runaways, and black and white abolitionists—known as the Underground Railroad. At the start of their trip and along the way, they were also aided by family members and other enslaved people. This series of photographs envisions what the long road to freedom may have looked like as seen through the eyes of someone making this epic journey.
Using newspaper clippings, books, period documents, personal narratives, and existing research made available to me by the Indiana Historical Society, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the Freedom Trails Commission, among others, I envisioned one possible route of escape along the Underground Railroad—from a cotton plantation in Louisiana all the way north to Canada.* I also relied on local lore, interviewing people in communities where it was rumored that stops on the Underground Railroad existed.
The unnumbered routes of the Underground Railroad encompassed countless square miles and paths through many states. The particular path I constructed runs roughly 2,000 miles and depicts sites, cities, and places that freedom seekers passed through—or may have passed through—during their journey.
The Underground Railroad was a loose network of people—from white and black abolitionists and religious groups to female anti-slavery societies and everyday people—who were all working towards a common cause. I believe an appreciation and understanding of this history can inspire and remind us of how diverse groups of people can play a role in challenging and resisting social injustices today.
—Jeanine Michna-Bales, October 2015
*The particular path that the artist envisioned was very rare. Few people escaped from the Deep South to the North, and even fewer to Canada.
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Diagram of the Heart
20151021-gordon-mw23-collection-001
Farida Ado Gaci, 27, a romance novelist living in Northern Nigeria, at her window. She is one of a small but significant group of Nigerian women authors of books called littattafan soyayya, Hausa for “love literature.”
Kano Nigeria, April 2013
© Glenna Gordon
20151021-gordon-mw23-collection-002
Fauziyya D. Sulaiman, a romance novelist, reads a book at the market after dropping off her newest release for sale. Littattafan soyayya books are printed cheaply and quickly, and sold for about 50–100 naira, or less than one U.S. dollar.
Kano, Nigeria, April 2013
© Glenna Gordon
20151021-gordon-mw23-collection-003
Graffiti outside a school shows a diagram of the heart.
Kano, Nigeria, February 2014
© Glenna Gordon
20151021-gordon-mw23-collection-004
A bride walks through a corridor connecting two homes. Many houses in Kano are constructed with several rooms leading into a shared open space, and corridors connect one home to the next, especially in the old city.
Kano, Nigeria, September 2013
© Glenna Gordon
20151021-gordon-mw23-collection-005
Hadiza Sani Garba works on her novel while lying in bed at home. Most authors write their novels by hand in composition books. Afterwards, they are typed, mimeographed, assembled by hand, and published.
Kano, Nigeria, September 2013
© Glenna Gordon
20151021-gordon-mw23-collection-006
A bride sits with her mother on her wedding day.
Dawakin Tofa, Nigeria, November 2014
© Glenna Gordon
20151021-gordon-mw23-collection-007
A bride at her wedding.
Kano, Nigeria, April 2013
© Glenna Gordon
20151021-gordon-mw23-collection-008
Rabi’a Talle Maifata, a romance novelist, walks in the courtyard of her office at the Ministry of Information.
Kano, Nigeria, February 2014
© Glenna Gordon
20151021-gordon-mw23-collection-009
Lubabatu Ya’h is a popular writer who also produces Hausa films.
Kano, Nigeria, April 2013
© Glenna Gordon
20151021-gordon-mw23-collection-010
Sa’adatu Baba Ahmad Fagge has written many novels and also reviews them in local newspapers. She assisted in creating the book summaries and translations for this exhibition.
Abuja, Nigeria, April 2013
© Glenna Gordon
20151021-gordon-mw23-collection-011
Balaraba Ramat Yakubu was the first woman to write a Hausa littattafan soyayya novel. She often writes about forced marriage and other issues affecting women.
Kano, Nigeria, April 2013
© Glenna Gordon
20151021-gordon-mw23-collection-012
Baidau Muhammed Gaba has written 15 novels. She is uninterested in jobs that would require her to work outside of her house, and luckily writing allows her to work at home.
Kaduna, Nigeria, April 2013
© Glenna Gordon
20151021-gordon-mw23-collection-013
Umma R. Homhammed writes every day for about six hours, and it takes her about two months to finish most of her books. Her novels are often about love, and the challenges her characters face related to tribalism and co-wives.
Kaduna, Nigeria, April 2013
© Glenna Gordon
20151021-gordon-mw23-collection-014
Rabi’a Talle Maifata’s next novel will be called Victim of Love.
Kano, Nigeria, April 2013
© Glenna Gordon
20151021-gordon-mw23-collection-015
Newly printed pages of books are bound by hand.
Kano, Nigeria, April 2013
© Glenna Gordon
20151021-gordon-mw23-collection-016
Books are tied and packaged at the local market.
Kano, Nigeria, October 2013
© Glenna Gordon
20151021-gordon-mw23-collection-017
Jamila Umar Tanko, a popular writer, stands inside the bookshop that she runs. She opened her own shoo at the market after she was tired of not getting paid fairly for her book sales by the other men running shops in the market.
Kano, Nigeria, October 2013
© Glenna Gordon
Glenna Gordon
Glenna Gordon (American, b. 1981) is a documentary photographer and photojournalist working often in West Africa and elsewhere on the continent. Her work has covered topics ranging from Nigerian weddings, traces left behind by the 300 schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram, released Western hostages kidnapped by ISIS and al-Qaeda, and Muslim women romance novelists in the Sahel region.
In addition to winning a World Press Photo award in 2015, Gordon’s work has received many honors including from the LensCulture Visual Storytelling Awards (2014), the PDN Photo Annual competition (2013), and the PX3 Prix de la Photographie Paris (2014).
Gordon has been commissioned by Le Monde, the New York Times, Time magazine, and the Wall Street Journal, and her images have been included in group shows in London, New York, Nigeria, and Washington, D.C. Gordon is an adjunct professor at The New School in New York.
Artist Statement
Glenna Gordon
Rabi’a Talle Maifata is one of several dozen popular romance novelists living in the predominantly Muslim northern city of Kano, Nigeria’s second biggest city. She is one of a small but significant group of women in Northern Nigeria writing books called littattafan soyayya, meaning “love literature” in the Hausa language.
Read by women and girls in Northern Nigeria and across the Sahel region, these stories are somewhere in between morality tales and romance novels. Small publishers print thousands of copies of the stories, and the books are sold in markets and streets for a dollar or two each.
Littattafan soyayya writers, who are all devout Muslims, must face off with Islamic censors who make them register with the Hisbah, a morality police, as well as government officials, such as a minister of education who publicly burned many books in 2007. These novels range in tone from subversive and disruptive of the norm—speaking out against child marriage and human trafficking—to those that yield to the status quo, advising women on how best to please their husbands and offering fantasies of escape and tales of the poor girl marrying the rich man.
Northern Nigeria made headlines in 2014 when the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram—the name translates to “Western education is sinful”—kidnapped nearly 300 schoolgirls from a remote dormitory. Tens of thousands of people have died since 2009 due to the insurgency led by Boko Haram separatists and the Nigerian army’s escalating response.
While I covered this and other stories as a photojournalist, the authors and their books enabled me to photograph without the constraints of a predetermined narrative or media cycle. Guided by the themes of the novels, my aim is to explore romance, tradition, love, and loss in Northern Nigeria.
—Glenna Gordon, October 2015
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Texting Syria
20151021-maloney-mw23-collection-001
Thirty minutes from the Syria–Lebanon border, 16 families seeking refuge from ongoing conflict in Homs, Syria, live in tents erected inside an abandoned slaughterhouse. At night, they text friends and family still under siege.
Akkar, Lebanon, July 2013
© Liam Maloney
20151021-maloney-mw23-collection-002
Thirty minutes from the Syria–Lebanon border, 16 families seeking refuge from ongoing conflict in Homs, Syria, live in tents erected inside an abandoned slaughterhouse. At night, they text friends and family still under siege.
Akkar, Lebanon, July 2013
© Liam Maloney
20151021-maloney-mw23-collection-003
The text, translated from the original Arabic, shows actual messages sent between a refugee in Lebanon and a loved one still trapped in Syria.
Akkar, Lebanon, July 2013
© Liam Maloney
20151021-maloney-mw23-collection-004
Thirty minutes from the Syria–Lebanon border, 16 families seeking refuge from ongoing conflict in Homs, Syria, live in tents erected inside an abandoned slaughterhouse. At night, they text friends and family still under siege.
Akkar, Lebanon, July 2013
© Liam Maloney
20151021-maloney-mw23-collection-005
Thirty minutes from the Syria–Lebanon border, 16 families seeking refuge from ongoing conflict in Homs, Syria, live in tents erected inside an abandoned slaughterhouse. At night, they text friends and family still under siege.
Akkar, Lebanon, July 2013
© Liam Maloney
20151021-maloney-mw23-collection-006
The text, translated from the original Arabic, shows actual messages sent between a refugee in Lebanon and a loved one still trapped in Syria.
Akkar, Lebanon, July 2013
© Liam Maloney
20151021-maloney-mw23-collection-007
Thirty minutes from the Syria–Lebanon border, 16 families seeking refuge from ongoing conflict in Homs, Syria, live in tents erected inside an abandoned slaughterhouse. At night, they text friends and family still under siege.
Akkar, Lebanon, July 2013
© Liam Maloney
Liam Maloney
Liam Maloney (Canadian, b. 1975) is a Toronto-based documentary photographer working on stories about conflict and forced migration the Middle East. Central themes in his work are the idea of home and its significance for those who have been displaced, as well as the intersection of technology and intimacy during wartime.
Clients include the CBC, Foreign Policy, the Globe and Mail, the Guardian, Maclean’s, Mother Jones, La Maleta de Portbou, TIME magazine, and VICE magazine. Maloney’s work has been exhibited in large-format outdoor installations in Canada, and at Images: Festival des Arts Visuels de Vevey (Switzerland), Photoville (New York), and Scotiabank Nuit Blanche (Toronto).
Maloney was shortlisted for the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize (2014), and has been nominated for the News Photographers Association of Canada’s Picture Story of the Year (2014). Maloney participated in the Eddie Adams Workshop in 2007, holds a RISC certificate in battlefield medical response, and is a member of the Frontline Freelance Network.
Artist Statement
Liam Maloney
Texting Syria is an installation exploring the experience of Syrian refugees in the context of connectivity in the digital age. In these portraits, Syrians in Lebanon fleeing the civil war back home use mobile phones to stay in touch with their families who remain under siege in the city of Homs. A mundane and ubiquitous act—checking or sending a text message—is transformed by war into communiqués that can be a matter of life and death.
Viewers are invited to connect to a remote SMS server that streams—directly to the viewer’s phone—a series of actual text messages that were received at the time the photographs were taken. In these messages, we get a glimpse of how technology can help people caught in a horrific war sustain their courage and dignity.
My goal is to create an immersive experience that offers viewers a degree of intimacy often missing from media coverage of this enduring international crisis that has claimed the lives of over 200,000 people to date and has displaced millions. My work aims to question the expectations we have of documentary photography and considers parallel narratives that images alone cannot adequately represent.
Texting Syria is part of a larger ongoing body of work titled Material Remains, a multilayered interactive project about the plight of Syrian refugees and the traces that war leaves behind. Incorporating thermal imaging portraits, SMS messaging, lightboxes, video projections, and audio narratives, Material Remains examines the Syrian conflict in ways that move beyond conventional methods of examining war. It is an attempt to compile a multisensory body of irrefutable evidence that archives the experiences of those who have lost everything in the Syrian war.
—Liam Maloney, October 2015
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In Transit: Columbia Records, Athens
20151021-kouris-mw23-collection-001
Sofian, a migrant from Algeria, sits inside the deserted Columbia Records building. Sofian lived in the building for six months, eventually returning to his homeland after his efforts to reach France were unsuccessful.
Athens, Greece, September 2010
© Dionysis Kouris
20151021-kouris-mw23-collection-002
Khalifa shaves in the mirror at the deserted Columbia Records building.
Athens, Greece, September 2010
© Dionysis Kouris
20151021-kouris-mw23-collection-003
A makeshift room at the deserted Columbia Records building.
Athens, Greece, January 2012
© Dionysis Kouris
20151021-kouris-mw23-collection-004
An Algerian man sleeps in a shared space at the deserted Columbia Records building.
Athens, Greece, October 2012
© Dionysis Kouris
20151021-kouris-mw23-collection-005
A man washes clothes at the deserted Columbia Records building with water collected from a nearby park.
Athens, Greece, September 2010
© Dionysis Kouris
20151021-kouris-mw23-collection-006
Mohamed reads the Koran during Ramadan. He had hung a Greek flag in the window in hopes of curbing the racist attacks that had surged against those in the building.
Athens, Greece, September 2010
© Dionysis Kouris
20151021-kouris-mw23-collection-007
A group of Algerian men share lunch together. They are all undocumented migrants.
Athens, Greece, October 2012
© Dionysis Kouris
20151021-kouris-mw23-collection-008
Still image from In Transit: Columbia Records, Athens, 2015
Running time: 5 minutes
Using footage taken inside the deserted Columbia Records building, Kouris presents what daily life is like for a group of Algerian men living in limbo between North Africa and Europe.
© Dionysis Kouris
20151021-kouris-mw23-collection-009
Abdul climbs to his makeshift room in the deserted Columbia Records building. Due to increasing police raids, he has chosen a room with difficult access.
Athens, Greece, September 2010
© Dionysis Kouris
Dionysis Kouris
Dionysis Kouris (Greek, b. 1968) earned a degree in photography from the Arts University of Bournemouth, United Kingdom, in 1992 and worked in Greece for more than 10 years as a studio and editorial photographer. In 2006, after he took part in a one-week workshop with Gary Knight from VII Photo, Kouris transitioned to social documentary photography. In 2010, he completed his photographic studies at the London College of Communication, receiving an MA in photojournalism and documentary photography.
Kouris was selected for the Eddie Adams Workshop in 2010 and produced a multimedia story, “Road to the Future,” with Brian Storm. His work has been recognized in the PDN Photo Annual competition in 2011 and 2012, and received Honorable Mention in the Poznań Photo Diploma Award competition at the 2011 Biennale of Photography in Poznań, Poland. Since 2008, Kouris’s focus has increasingly turned to immigration and the consequences of the financial crisis in Europe.
Artist Statement
Dionysis Kouris
In the early 1930s, Columbia Records, under the recording and publishing company EMI, was the first record label to open a studio and factory in Greece. Due in part to the demand for exports to the Middle East, the factory enjoyed success in the 1950s through 1980s. The factory closed down in 1991, and starting around 2009, the record company’s deserted building was frequently occupied by migrant squatters.
“We are Palestinians. All the people here come from Palestine,” one of the squatters named Aissa told me. Of the 60 to 70 North Africans, mostly from Algeria, who I photographed at the factory from 2010 to 2012, all of them had told the police their country of origin was Palestine, and they had received papers from the police indicating this. Their hope was that if they were identified as Palestinians, they would have a greater chance of obtaining asylum as refugees instead of being classified as economic migrants, who have fewer chances of acquiring legal papers. In fact, in many cases the distinction between asylum seekers, refugees, and economic migrants is confusing and not easy to untangle.
Due to a dearth of jobs in Greece, nearly all of the migrants I met wanted to continue on to France or another large, wealthy European country. Some would try their luck at the port of Patras, hiding in containers and trucks in hopes of boarding a ship to Italy. Others managed to buy a fake passport or identity card and attempted to travel by plane to different European destinations.
Today, in 2015, Greece has newly emerged as a country receiving large numbers of immigrants. Its geographical position makes it a gatekeeper to the European Union. There are very few legal entry paths, and almost all migrants arrive illegally. Conflict and political upheaval in North Africa and Syria have prompted a surge of immigrants. Meanwhile, Greece is undergoing its worst economic crisis, adding complexity to the Greek government’s inability to cope with the influx of migrants.
Using the abandoned music factory as a central focus, my aim for this story is to explore how factors—such as xenophobia, the rise of far-right parties, and racist attacks—that often drive people away from a country are occurring in the very place that is now drawing people in.
—Dionysis Kouris, October 2015
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