This photo essay was a runner-up of the global photo contest by the Eur-Asian Border Lab for 2023, exploring the conceptual, formal, and metaphoric implications of borders and bordering
Essay by Luca Paolo Cirillo
When the border is home tells about migrant housing in Calais – definitively temporary spaces. I took the photos in June and July 2016 and, beyond the 15 composing the essay, I keep hundreds of them done with the same perspective in my personal archive.
Quoting a sentence of the photographer and main character of Smoke (1995), the movie by Wayne Wang and Paul Auster, the photographies composing this visual essay “are all the same, but each of them is different from the other”.
By providing an inquiry into the architectures and the aesthetics of these self-made shelter homes, When the border is home writes a variety of human stories through non-human subjects.
Luca Paolo Cirillo is a PhD candidate in Social and Cultural Geography at the University of Naples L’Orientale and at the Radboud University Nijmegen, as well as a member of the Mobility and International Migration Study Centre (MoMI) and of the Nijmegen Centre for Border Research (NCBR).
Email: lucap.cirillo@gmail.com
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-0558-8179
