Livio Senigalliesi: Imagine No Heaven
Inside The Balkan Route: The End of the Way
© Denis Vorobyov and Livio Senigalliesi for MSF
Time: 2 min. 53 seconds
Inside the Balkan Route 2016
Go To Exhibition: Inside the Balkan Route
Migrations are a tragic theme of our present. According to estimates released by UNHCR, more than 68 million people in the world are refugees. Men women and children forced to leave their homes because of wars, dictatorships, ethnic and religious clashes, famines and persecutions.
More than 40% of them are minors and seeing them with your eyes squeezes the heart because they could be your children. They have tattered clothes, bare feet and injured because of forced marches in the woods that bring them from Asia or the Middle East to the gates of Europe. A Europe deaf to their screams, closed and selfish, which builds new walls.
I embarked on the journey along the Balkan Route in 2016, from Lesbos to Gorizia, living a refugee life among the refugees, to document and learn about their dramas and their stories.
About 1700 kilometers traveled on foot or with makeshift vehicles from Lesbos, Athens, Idomeni, Skopje, Belgrade, Subotica, Budapest, Zagreb and finally Gorizia, the border area between Slovenia and Italy. In a world where everything goes quickly, I gave myself the time I needed, without running after the news but deepening the human issues or cases that are not found in newspapers and on television programs. I wore the shoes according to the good old rules of journalism. I discovered things I never wanted to see. Torture, kidnappings, violence of all kinds are a sad normality among refugees on the go. Fortunately, there are also beautiful, vital, positive moments such as the birth of a girl on the Piraeus Port pier near Athens.
Go To Exhibition: Inside the Balkan Route