Snapshots from the Borders

There is a Europe-wide campaign to make the 3rd of October the European Day of Memory and Welcome.

This date was chosen in remembrance of the day a boat capsized off the coast of Lampedusa in 2013, killing 366 children, women and men. This year, events took place on that very day across 30 European cities to raise awareness of the campaign.

Given recent inflammatory speeches by members of our government, which reduce people to figures and statistics, and disregard our responsibility toward people fleeing persecution, climate catastrophe and full-fledged war, we are calling on everyone to REMEMBER — We are all, every one of us, the descendants of migrants of one form or another. Movement for survival, and for a better life, is an undeniable part of our evolutionary and contemporary history as humans. The fact is that we have been traversing oceans, deserts and jungles for millennia.

These divisive speeches do not only reduce the conversation around migration to myths. They blatantly refuse, downplay and delete our messy, mobile origins. As a species, we must collectively recollect our very rootedness in migration, the very act which has brought us to where we are today. As Milan Kundera says, ‘The struggle of people against power is the struggle of remembering against forgetting’.

To find out more about the campaign, please visit: http://www.snapshotsfromtheborders.eu/