Evros
The Evros river draws a natural border between Greece and Turkey. For centuries this region has been a crossroads where Europe and the Middle East meet and mingle, a territory shaped by migration, by trade, by the rise and fall of empires.
Today the river has become one of the main gateways into the European Union for people in exile. Every year, thousands attempt the crossing, carried by the hope of a safer life or a new beginning. Some make it. Others vanish in the current, or into the opacity of the border apparatus.
In recent years the Evros has hardened into a fortified border. Fences stretch longer, patrols grow denser, surveillance technologies proliferate. Across Europe and beyond, borders are closing as states retreat behind security logic and narratives of national identity.
Against that backdrop, the human stories unfolding along the river risk dissolving into figures and political rhetoric. This work seeks to return to ground level, where individual trajectories, gestures of solidarity and each person's uncertainties speak the complexity of the world.
The Evros river separates Greece from Turkey. An old crossroads between East and West, the region has become a threshold once again: every year, thousands of people in exile attempt the border crossing here, in the hope of a better future.
How do you speak of a subject this vast, this tangled, rooted as much in harsh daily reality as in fantasy? EVROS grew out of that question. Not to understand everything, but to feel and to make felt: several stories, several objects, a few pieces of a larger puzzle. An aesthetic and emotional experience that reaches beyond the bare facts.
This artist's book brings together 177 photographs and texts from six months of documentary fieldwork in Greece and Turkey, including time spent sharing the daily life of a group of exiled people attempting to cross the river into Europe. Divided into eight objects inside a box, it offers a non-linear narrative, physical and tactile. Every fold, every texture is an invitation to explore.
The box and each of its objects are entirely handmade. The cover is a unique cyanotype print. Edition of 15 + 2 AP.
