Papers

Your documents don’t determine who you are but where you can go. When you enter a refugee camp it doesn’t take too much time to understand how the only thing that matters there are your documents. Your nationality makes all the difference between freedom and imprisonment. Therefore all the refugees coming into Europe are forced into their desperate journey only because their passports. In Gevgelija there is a short path that connects the Greek – Macedonian border with the refugee camp recently set up in the outskirts of the town. All the refugees who are allowed to enter Macedonia have to pass by that track through the fields. That path is a limbo from Greek bureaucracy to Macedonian bureaucracy. Along that path, every day, Greeks temporary documents are thrown away along with lists of names, maps and asylum requests. Immediately after leaving the country that issued the new documents, the refugees come back to a clandestine status. Their identities have to be confirmed again and again in every country they enter. This series of images is a collection of all those papers left behind by those who are making their way through Europe. Photographs, lists of travellers and asylum requests are all discarded along the way in the no man’s land before the next identification.