New Young Europeans [antikvár]

The first part of this journey began at the cade (the centre for adolescents in exile), an austere two storey building at the back of the Petit-Chateau, Belgium's largest reception centre for people seeking asylum. The CADE houses up to forty unaccompanied minors for periods ranging from four months to four years. In a programme supported by the British Council in Brussels, I had been inviting artists into the CADE to work with the teenagers resident there and I had built friendships with Alpha Bah, a seventeen year old from Sierra Leone and two sisters from Kosovo, Dona and Liza Gashi, who at the time were fifteen and seventeen years old. We talked a lot about the isolation they were feeling as young refugees and the separation they were experiencing from other young people their age. Yes, they had experienced particular trauma but, as they said, most teenagers have a tough time growing up. They were simply asking as young people who had lost parents, families and any given securities, to be offered the chance to rebuild their lives and be integrated into their new host country. This was the message they wanted to convey so I began to think about how to present this request in a way that had impact but did not isolate them as young refugees. The second part of this journey happened weeks later sitting in the courtyard of the reception centre with Carl Cordonnier, a photographer. I had seen some of Carl's previous portrait photography and found in his studies sadness, joy, strength and vulnerability, all of which I recognized in the young people I was working with at the CADE. Carl asked me if I saw what he saw in that courtyard and we agreed that we were witnessing extraordinary stories expressed within a building that represented the innocence of young lives disturbed by current global conflict. We decided to tell their stories through testimonies and portraits. Carl would take photographs of the young people and I would record their thoughts. They would decide how they wanted to be photographed and they would edit their own stories. In an attempt to portray them first and foremost as young people, not refugees, we also decided to tell the stories of the same number of young European teenagers who, although have legal status and have always lived in Europe, are also surviving adolescence and in their own ways have experienced sadness, loss and trauma.