What happens to the African migrants and refugees once they are brought from Lampedusa to the Italian mainland? Anthropologists Diana Reiners and Gilles Reckinger travelled to Calabria in early 2012, in order to conduct research on this topic. Together with Carole Reckinger, photographer and social scientist, they visited the people in the camps around Rosarno several times a year.
Many African migrants and refugees who enter Europe through Lampedusa end up working on the fruit and vegetable plantations in Southern Italy. Every year around Christmas, thousands of migrant workers pick our oranges for a hunger wage in the town of Rosarno, Calabria.For the rest of the year not much work is available in Rosarno, but some people earn so little that they cannot afford the journey to another region to find work for the rest of the year. They stay all year round, barely earning enough to buy food during the long hot summer months.
Reflecting to the outside world, the conditions under which people live in the heart of the European Union, is the main goal of this project.
But how can people whose voice is continuously excluded from public discourses make themselves heard? The participative approach of the photographical project takes this concern into account: the researchers gave some of the men digital photographic cameras to document their daily lives and capture what they want to show the out- side world. The goal is to combine the focus of the researchers and the gaze of the people concerned in order to give a voice to the socially disenfranchised. The authors of the respective pictures are marked by an initial and can be looked up in the legal notice section.
Is there any possibility to help? (financially or in a different way?)