REACHING EUROPE

REACHING EUROPE

CREDITS

GUP Author

GUP TEAM

Artist

Sofie Amalie Klougart, Marie Louise Albers

Artist Website

sofieamalieklougart.dk

In the news there has been a lot of coverage about the immigrants entering Europe by boats across the Mediterranean. While the coverage has been focused on the tragedies of the boats that don’t make it across and the deaths of their passengers, there has been little reported about what happens to the hundreds of thousands who do make it and what happens to them afterwards.

At the beginning of April 2015, Danish photographer Sofie Amalie Klougart (previously featured in GUP#44 – the Raw issue) and journalist Marie Louise Albers visited and documented a group of young men from Gambia, Senegal, Mali, Ghana and Guinea-Bissau living in a ‘Reception Center’ on the coast of Sicily. This temporary institution is only supposed to hold immigrants for a maximum of three days, these men have been detained inside this building for 13 days.

Struggling to cope with over 170,000 immigrants and refugees a year, Italy provides a single change of clothes — a worn out tracksuit, food for the detainees and a single phone call to their families which is restricted to less than one minute.

This series of images shows us how we treat these people, these refugees, upon their arrival in Europe where they are essentially immediately incarcerated.

The project was developed with the support of Doctors Without Borders Journalism Scholarship.