Medu – Medici per i diritti umani presents the photographic exhibition ” Agadez – Rosarno. Luoghi migranti allo specchio” with photos by Olmo Calvo and Rocco Rorandelli, realized with the support of RUFA – Rome University of Fine Arts.
Agadez, a desert city, is today a fundamental junction of migration flows from West Africa to Italy and Europe. In recent years hundreds of thousands of men, women and children have joined the city in flight from conflicts and violence, in waiting to face the crossing of the Sahara towards Libya, in what the migrants themselves call “the way to hell”. Since December 2017, refugees and asylum seekers, mostly Sudanese, have been following the same path in the opposite direction, fleeing from the Libyan torture camps, going back to Agadez.
Rosarno, is a town of several thousand inhabitants in the Piana di Gioia Tauro, known for its ‘ndrine, the “gardens” of oranges and the revolt of foreign laborers, now in its tenth anniversary. Every year, during the citrus harvesting season, more of 2000 migrants reach the Piana, providing cheap labour without rights to local producers, within an opaque and unfair production chain. For years, slums, abandoned farmhouses and ministerial tent cities have been the salient features of the landscape of exploitation.
The photographer Olmo Calvo met the patients assisted by the Medu psychological medical team in the humanitarian camp set up by UNHCR Niger in Agadez. Olmo gave us stories of women with suspended lives through looks of hope and resignation, of pain and relief, of love and anger. Invisible wounds that ooze from inscrutable eyes. Signs of unspeakable experiences that plough through the faces.
The photographer Rocco Rorandelli accompanied the mobile clinic and the Medu team in Calabria and Capitanata (Puglia), putting at the center of his photographic story the places inhabited by foreign laborers during the months of the collection. The photos, mostly aerial, depict informal landscapes housing ghettos, cottages and slums and tents ministerial common to the desolation and the absence of the minimum requirements of dignity.
The exhibition will be inaugurated on December 14 at 6 pm, and will be open from December 14 to 20, 2019 and from January 7 to 10, 2020 at RUFA Space – Via degli Ausoni 7, from 10 am to 7 pm.
