ENRI CANAJ

  • A small boat with refugees and migrants reached safely the Greek coast. It was hard getting out of the boat because of the bad sea conditions. Mytilene, Greece.

  • A Syrian mother holds her 4-months-old baby just after crossing the sea border between Turkey and Greece by boat. Inousa, Greece.

  • Refugees wait to board the boats towards Athens. Lesbos, Greece

  • Exhausted! The journey continues by train from Presevo to the northern Serbian town of Sid. The vast majority of migrants are from Syria and Afghanistan, reaching the eastern Aegean Greek islands from the nearby Turkish coast, before heading north to cross the border with Macedonia, Serbia and onwards to more prosperous European countries. Serbia

  • Life jackets from refugees and migrants on a small hill. Lesbos, Greece

  • Migrants try to get on a train heading to the border with Serbia at the train station in Gevgelija, on the Macedonian-Greek border. Gevgelija, Macedonia

  • Refugees stand in line for food. Idomeni, Greece

  • Refugees immigrants wait near the border railway station of Idomeni, Northern Greece, in order to be allowed by the Macedonian police to cross the border. Idomeni, Greece

  • One volunteer distributes food to refugees near the village Idomeni, Greece, near the border with Macedonia. Idomeni, Greece

The Wind Cries War

From 2013 I have been documenting the refugee influx into Europe, and the passages from Turkey to Greece and the Balkan route. I depicted these arduous journeys with a sense of witnessing history in-the- making. And keeping in mind the diversity of reasons that led people to flee: blazing or protracted wars, internal displacements, minority exclusion, religious oppression, gender-based violence. Behind the figures, countless agonies, countless stories of survival. Caught in a state of limbo between hope and uncertainty, people transited through perilous routes in order to get to the desired –but often unclear- final destinations that are somehow expected to grant them the opportunity to live.
This is the part that I am now turning to: the first steps of a new life in the new places. What happens at the end of the journey, once reaching the final destinations. Perhaps not the expected or desired ones, perhaps not as welcoming as initially expected, but still, the places that will become the new homes, that will shelter the uprooted lives, that will allow a shared future to grow. I intend to focus on the minute details of everyday life, and to depict the nuances and the inner struggles. I plan to follow various people that I encountered and became close with throughout this passage, and see them again in their new place of residence, in the process of acquiring a new pace, of becoming familiar with a new culture and acquiring new habits, of forming new ties, of creating a new life away from home, and imagining a future. Throughout the grey zones between xenophobia and integration, my work will try to depict the challenge of this shared future.