Nowhere at home
2014 I started to photograph unaccompanied minor refugees. At that time, they were housed in former military barracks somewhere in Munich. 2015, when the numbers of refugees arriving in Germany became higher and higher and the situation seemed to get out of control, I was forbidden by the authorities to continue my visits to the barracks. For about a year I abandoned my project, but then, quite out of nowhere, two camps for refugees were set up in the posh suburban village I actually live in. I wanted to continue my project and I joined a group of people who decided to help the refugees around.
The beginnings all of us were full of hope. We organized language classes, looked for educational opportunities, and assisted the refugees to cope with an unbelievable German bureaucracy. But soon German politics turned against the refugees.
Those refugees who already had jobs, were now forbidden to work, condemned to do nothing, and the pressure on them to leave the country grew. We, the helpers, had to witness how these people we cared for were really hurt. Not just once, but again and again.
2014 - 2017
My husband
Danait is 19 and comes from Eritrea. Now she lives here, in my posh little suburb. She is housed in one of the tin containers the authorities had put up and shares a room of fourteen square meters with five other women.
She never says a bad word about of her roommates, but i know she wishes herself to a place far away.
Danait can not be separated from her cell phone. incessantly she talks to the one she calls her husband, -my husband-, she says whenever she speaks of him, he is now in another country, they were separated on the run.
And the chocolate ice cream drips on her hand, she doesn't get to lick it even once, because she just can´t stop talking to him.
Tomorrow Danait will be allowed to go to school in the city for the first time, and today she tells me about her sister, who she's been worried about lately..., because she, too, has set off for Europe, via Libya, and then across the Mediterranean sea.
She tells me now how she herself sat in a boat on her flight, together with 450 other people, and the boat was leaking, and the engine stank, and she drank the sea water, and then, when she vomited, the vomit was all yellow.
And then Danait shows me pictures of women and men on the luminous rectangle of her phone, she shows me pictures of mothers and children, of boys and girls, she shows me people, who until recently had dreams and now lie drowned somewhere in the sea.
And I looked at the young woman and was completely without language and didn't really understand anything and now in the evening comes the sadness and an inkling of what is, and an inkling of how it could all be, for this woman, who lives in this tin container, on her cell phone pictures of dead people and the silence of her sister inside in her head.