Foreign Landscape


  • Photographer
    Dawid Zielinski
  • Prize
    Honorable Mention
  • Technical Info
    Fujifilm X

The series consists of 5 images and accompanying text (see story below) and reflects on the landscape during 2015-2016 refugee crisis.

Story

Wars, famine, poverty and climate change continue to drive people out from their homes, communities, countries,
to the unknown. They join millions who are already on the move, constantly, restlessly, occupying spaces on the
margins of the first world. Continously interacting with their surroundings and the landscape they encounter along
the way, they leave their mark, however elusive. From subtle signs in the forest undergrowths to discarded blankets
to makeshift food stalls. This new and unexpected human presence is transforming the environment inhabitated
and organized long ago, even if it's just a for a day, a week or a month, as they keep moving through the landscape
scarred by walls and fences, running, hiding and then running again.

In 2015 and 2016, I covered the refugee crisis as it was unfolding in various European countries. Gradually, I
became increasingly interested in how their arrival was transforming the landscape. Serving initially as a backdrop
for their story, it gradually started to tell its own tale, one of fear and despair but also hope and resilience, among
new divisions and borders brought by rapidly deteriorating political climate.

Instead of following the routine of descriptive and news oriented work that we've seen again and again, I plan to
focus on the dynamics of landscape transformations along established migration routes and the ephemeral traces
of migrant presence.

With this approach, I want to explore the general idea of temporality and draw parallels between migrant's plight
and the conditions of contemporary nomads as they echo the same story of constant movement in todays liquid
global society.

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