Migrations and human rights, “Lives in motion”: the exhibition on the dreams and challenges of 16 adolescents in Italy

ROME – From today at noon, in Rome’s Tiburtina Station, theUNICEF – in collaboration with Large Retail Stations and with the support of Italian Academy – presents the photographic exhibition “Lives in Motion. Dreams and challenges of 16 teenagers in Italy”. The photographic exhibition will be inaugurated on the occasion of the World Human Rights Day (which is celebrated on December 10) until the international day for the rights of migrants (set for next December 18). The choice of the station to host the exhibition is symbolic which, through selected shots, invites the visitor to look at the world through the eyes of girls and boys who have found themselves leaving their country of origin and have recently arrived in Italy. The exhibition is in fact the result of a workshop that involved 16 girls and boys from 6 different countries in collaboration with Giacomo Pirozzi, a professional photographer who has been working with UNICEF since 1991 in contexts of vulnerability.

The keywords: nostalgia, dream, normality. Girls and boys were guided in a technical study of the image, they were given a camera with which they described cross-sections of their reality, which they commented on with a careful work of narration. The shots, collected in 14 panels, tell different stories, but linked by common characteristics: a past that leads to a journey, the challenges along the migratory path and the more common ones related to adolescence, dreams and future hopes. Each panel also highlights the key words that emerged during the workshop – nostalgia, movement, travel, life, hope, dream, normality – thus revealing the experiences behind the more or less voluntary choice to undertake the migratory path.

The story of Nika, 15 years old. Among the stories told that of Nika, 15 years old, from Ukraine. The girl leaves Kharkiv after the bombing began. She arrives in Rome. In her shots she tells scenes of daily life, people with a migratory background and with a path probably similar to hers, “perhaps in search of a new normality” explains the girl. About her Photograph a cathedral with a blue sky in the background, for her the dream of finding the same free sky once she returns to her country. Among the stories told by the panels is that of Mamoudou, 16, from Guinea Conakry. You leave your country in the post COVID-19 period, due to the difficult conditions in which your family was living. Her photos tell of her dream of completing her studies, becoming an engineer and soon returning to her country.