THE_CONCRETE_PROJECT
- Part 1 -
The Concrete List
As an independent visual Art-project, “The Concrete Project” aims to offer an approach to consider concrete global corrosion of ethical and social values. The growing tendency towards self-contemplation, self-glorification and self-satisfaction in modern western societies increasingly subordinates ethical and social values and replaces with financial and self-profit concepts.
Meanwhile, as concrete and mankind threatening problems become increasingly global, concrete political solutions seem to respond exclusively to the insatiable need of national politicians to protect their own interests in convincing voters to maintain their local power base. In opposition to general globalization, national politics are turning into a self-satisfying local collective masturbation. Social and ethical values are no longer valid beyond the respective national borders: “Me First!”
At the same time, the “Me First!” politics worldwide, fomented by intentional creation of liquid collective fear, and due to it’s self-orientated psychology, is provoking enormous concrete human tragedies and disasters. Entire peoples are moving just to save their lives. But as they reach the first world’s protectionism, these moving crowds are dropped and left behind in their helplessness in a state of desperate, concrete migration.
The personal identity of the migrating individual is no longer a question of recognition parting from a personal history; it is no longer defined by the trajectory of the individuals’ life, but instead haphazardly and through social and historical circumstances, by the sum of sophisms used in the community into which the individual aims to arrive. This is where the hard journey in search of the recognition of a new, valid identity within the new social context begins. It is an odyssey that transforms any migrating individual into a concrete Ulyssean descendant.
In the form of a Concrete list of all documented cases of “deaths of refugees and migrants, due to restrictive policies of Fortress Europe” for the last 25 years, we face the whole dimension of the disaster the collective ignorance and absence of social and ethical values Europe is responsible for. This list currently fills 56 pages and is still ongoing... It’s not each individual case itself, which makes it so astonishing; it’s the sum of all 34,361 silenced lives.
In this piece each one of these pages are printed out on a 30 x 30 cm concrete plate in order to remember the injustice committed against any single one listed within.
The Concrete List
56 plates 30x30cm, concrete, 2018.
The Concrete List
detail.
The Concrete List
120x420cm,
concrete, iron,
2018.
About the UNITED List of Refugee Deaths
Since 1993 UNITED has been monitoring the deadly results of the building of ‘Fortress Europe’ by making a list of the refugees and migrants, who have died in their attempt of entering the ‘Fortress’ or as a result of Europe’s immigration policies. In the period 1993-2018 at least 34.361 refugee deaths can be attributed to the ‘Fatal Policies of Fortress Europe’. Most probably 1000s more are never found.
The ‘List of Deaths’ summarises information on where, when and under which circumstances they died. On all death cases further documentation is kept in archive. The data are collected through own research, information received from the network organisations in 48 countries and from local experts, journals and researchers in the field of migration. Compiled in the ‘List of Deaths’ they add up to an impressive listing and a strong campaign statement: No More Deaths – Time For Change!
Source: http://www.unitedagainstracism.org/campaigns/refugee-campaign/fortress-europe/
