honorable mention
Miguel Marques portugal
title
Road to Nowhere
In 'Road to Nowhere', an ongoing personal project I've started in 2016, I focus on migration hot spots to work around the concept of border and failed transition to a new world. The paths that migrants try to cross over and over, instead of leading to recognizable places that someone could wish to be a part of, show us this sort of no man's land, full of obstacles, emptiness, menacing apparatus and labyrinthic design. Metaphorically, the road to Europe becomes a road to nowhere, where significance is lost and no desirable meaning can be found.
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If conceived as a cultural territory, an ideal, a community, Europe becomes a kind of thematic background in my photographic projects. I've been making stories about migrants, nationalism, Schengen borders, and all these subjects interest me because they defy the idea of Europe that was taught to me in school and by society in general, based on freedom and equality.
I’ve training in photojournalism with CENJOR (Porto), photography in IPF (Porto) and an internship at Global Imagens Agency (Porto).
Currently I live and work as a freelance photographer in Porto.
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entry description
The day my country signed the EEC accession treaty, in 1985, I was nine years old. That date was a cornerstone of my childhood. From that day forward, I drunk from the European great ideals such as pacifism, solidarity and humanism, as a baby from his mamma's breast; but today, disclaimed by reality, cruelly aware that such Europe does not exist and probably will never be possible, disappointed of what I dreamed of back in my youth, I use my camera as a tool to (re)construct a new particular vision of Europe, more critical and wary, even if not totally unaware of greatness and utopia.In 'Road to Nowhere', an ongoing personal project I've started in 2016, I focus on migration hot spots to work around the concept of border and failed transition to a new world. The paths that migrants try to cross over and over, instead of leading to recognizable places that someone could wish to be a part of, show us this sort of no man's land, full of obstacles, emptiness, menacing apparatus and labyrinthic design. Metaphorically, the road to Europe becomes a road to nowhere, where significance is lost and no desirable meaning can be found.
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If conceived as a cultural territory, an ideal, a community, Europe becomes a kind of thematic background in my photographic projects. I've been making stories about migrants, nationalism, Schengen borders, and all these subjects interest me because they defy the idea of Europe that was taught to me in school and by society in general, based on freedom and equality.
about the photographer
I was born in Lisbon, in 1976.I’ve training in photojournalism with CENJOR (Porto), photography in IPF (Porto) and an internship at Global Imagens Agency (Porto).
Currently I live and work as a freelance photographer in Porto.
back to gallery