Nomadic Library

Resume

Over the past twelve years Ad van Denderen photographed migrants and refugees who were under way to the rich West. He stayed for weeks in squalid pensions in Istanbul, where Pakistanis wait for the human traffickers who will bring them to Greece. He joined police patrols along the border between Greece and Turkey, where it was primarily Sri Lankans who were arrested, and watched how men and women stepped soaking wet from their small boats at night near Tarifa, in Spain, after their rough sea passage from Morocco.

Ever more people make the decision to leave house and home. Aided by their families, they will journey for months, sometimes under dreadful conditions. Van Denderen saw a shadow world arise, of people who are willing to do anything to make a living. They work in the fields of Greece, as prostitutes along Italy’s roads, in the greenhouses at El Ejido, in Spain. Van Denderen recorded their lives. He photographed them in the places where they sleep, the fields where they work, in the prisons intended especially for aliens.‘It’s a hard life,’ says Van Denderen of the migrants. ‘I want to give them a face.’

Ad van Denderen has published in Geo, Stern, Vrij Nederland and The Independent. In 2001 he received the French Visa d'Or and the Care Award for this series, in 2002 the Dutch Scherpenzeel prize. Van Denderen’s images are complemented by the filmed portraits in the four-screen production Britanya by photographer and filmmaker Marjoleine Boonstra (1959). Britanya was shot early in 2003 in Sangatte, the North French provincial town near the entrance to the Canal Tunnel, where the controversial refugee centre closed its doors on 2 December, 2002. In Britanya the refugees, now generally roaming the streets, have their say. Just as in her previous, award-winning production Sa Nule (1996), Boonstra places her characters in front of a mirror and asks them to describe their own lives. Britanya is being shown for the first time during Go No Go. - From the publisher