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The Encyclopedia of Migrants collects the letters of 400 people, intimate stories of those who left everything and settled in Europe. An unusual and very moving initiative. “This encyclopedia is a completely political and artistic act in which we claim the dignity and freedom of people,” says the person in charge of the project, the Spanish artist Paloma Fernández Sobrino, with whom we spoke in this edition of Escala in Paris.
The project began in Rennes, in the west of France, where this multifaceted artist who practices dance and theater has lived for almost 20 years. It was in the association ‘L’Âge de la Tortue’, when he began to collect the first letters, to later become a project financed by the European Union with testimonies collected on the European Atlantic coast, from Gibraltar, the south of the Iberian Peninsula , to Finisterre, in France.
“All the letters are addressed to loved ones who are or were in the places where these people were born. What these letters have in common is the uprooting experienced, although in a different way in each one of them. There is a third person that is born in you when you emigrate: the person from there, the person from here and as a third being that is the sum of all that wisdom that the road is going to give you”, explains Fernández Sobrino.
“Having a daughter, for you and for all the other mothers, the other fathers, is a burden, ties and obligations! Is that why girls are punished by cutting in our country? And you, mom, did you also want to punish me by deciding to cut me? Or did you want to protect me?” writes an Egyptian woman living in Rennes. On many occasions, the letters are harsh or give an account of a reality from which their protagonist wanted to escape or highlight that migrants have problems like others, except that they have to face them far from their families.
“I am writing to tell you some things, but this time I want you to read my letter in front of the whole family…As you already knew, I have been busy for several weeks with medical analyzes and tests, of which I was waiting for a response. I saw it coming, I already sensed it when the doctor called me that day, the sky fell on me, because he told me what I had… Now they tell me I have breast cancer”, writes a young Peruvian resident in the south of Spain.
“What we seek with these letters is to dignify migrants. We hear a lot about migrants because of politics, because of tragedies, because of misery; and then the idea of working with the personal, with the unique aspects of each person was a way of making all those life stories visible and valuing them”, underlines the person in charge of the project.
Why call it an encyclopedia?
It is a true encyclopedia, old-fashioned, three volumes with leather covers, bound by hand with gilt. A luxury object that collects the wisdom of many people who have no voice.
“When I started the project I didn’t have in mind the encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert, the great encyclopedia of lights. So, people started asking me, what do you know about the encyclopedia? That’s when I decided that the project had to be called that because it’s as if they were questioning its legitimacy, who is legitimate to talk about the encyclopedia, the lights, Diderot and d’Alembert? Are migrants legitimate people to express their knowledge to us? I think so,” he concludes.
The National Museum of the History of Immigration in Paris has acquired it for its collection and can be consulted online at the link: http://www.enciclopedia-de-los-migrantes.eu
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