After the four teams that left in May 2019 before the European elections, here we are: the Mediterranean Caravan, ready to leave for the last route of the project, ending at the Transeuropa Festival “Beyond the wall” in Palermo.
Walls, borders, boundaries, freedom of movement within the EU community and outside, those are some of the topics we will tackle during our journey. We will travel across Croatia, Slovenia and Italy, three countries whose histories and cultures are deeply entangled with migration and hospitality, where migrants, european and non european, live transboundary experiences on a daily basis.
In times of enclosure of civic spaces, close waters and minds, migration and borders are often nuanced with an aggressive and defensive tone. Mobility and shifting political lines are part of human history instead and this is specifically accurate for the countries involved in this route, whose current nation states were developed from convergences of diverse cultures, religions and traditions that put in question political borders.
We wish to acknowledge the role of migration in the current richness and composition of our nations states and the necessity of crossing borders including the invisible ones, the cultural and social borders within our cities, to promote a less polarized Europe.
The aim is to engage in meaningful conversations with local initiatives and people, filling the gap generated by this polarized political narrative that turns our social sphere in a space at risk, where anger and hostility is slowly replacing hospitality and dialogue, facing therefore those intangible borders and walls, harder to break down.
The hope is to take a journey through the history and the present time of three countries, to catch a glance of a future that many realities, communities and organisations, are struggling every day to build. “Connecting struggle and building alternatives” that is the Caravans’ slogan we hope to put into practice in order to build a different narrative.