THE STORIES OF YOUNG REFUGEES
THROUGH THE LENS OF THE OTHER
THE PROJECT
Through the Lens of the Other, is an Erasmus+ European Youth Together project,
combined with 13 organizations from Greece, Inter Alia as the lead organization, and the
partners from Bulgaria, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Malta, Romania, Spain, Sweden,
Turkey and the United Kingdom. The project aims to introduce and explore new ways of
understanding and addressing discrimination in Europe.
Critical theories in social sciences explain, through the concept of intersectionality,
how oppressive social beliefs and structures (xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, ableism,
etc.) are interconnected; systematic oppression cannot be understood or addressed with
single-issue approaches as they tend to accentuate a specific part of the target
groups’ identity and, thus, perpetuate otherness.
Co-existing multiple identities demand an approach to integration that is holistic and
sensitive to different experiences. Discrimination due to gender, sexuality, race, culture, physical ability, ethnicity and nationality are the main aspects that the project centers upon; its influence
is in the social, economic and behavioral development of the people affected and can be expressed in different terms.
Apart from the marginalization, which is the main influence on their social
development, discrimination can be detected in the exclusion of the aforementioned
people from equal treatment by institutions (e.g. unequal access to democratic rights, discrimination in the workplace, access to the labor market). All the partners in the
project tackle on the challenges of the people who are facing discrimination
in their surroundings.
Turkey, where EPEKA is located, has been hosting the biggest number of refugees
among the partnership, focused on the challenges of the refugees, migrants and asylum
seekers and made the society understand their experiences through their perspective.
Thus, EPEKA made a short documentary movie which projects the experiences of the
refugee children before they left their country with the drawings and their voices. The exhibition
here presents the drawings that refugee children made during the shooting of the movie.
What is unique is that the children drew while they were telling theirs tories.
We recommend you to watch the documentary after visiting the exhibition to better
understand how they experienced fleeing from their countries and what they went through.
THEIR LENS
The participants of these project narrated their stories in Turkish while drawing the most
important events, describing details that impacted them and will stay in their memories for years to come. By clicking the names below you will have access to each personal story and if you speak Turkish we encourage you to play the audio while you contemplate the pictures that these
young migrants drew.
AMIR'S STORY
BAHAR'S STORY
YASIN'S STORY
THEIR STORIES
Here you will find the narrated stories of the youngsters who fled from their home countries
with their families and are currently living in Turkey as refugees. The drawings they made were scanned and the audio samples were collected from the short movie. They were kept anonymous, showing us only their hands and sharing their voices.
ABDULLAH'S STORY
Bahar
14
Afghanistan
Yasin
12
Iraq
GALLERY
Besides the stories that you just saw, we would also like to share the drawings of other
youngsters that didn't participate in the making of the movie. These are like an actual gallery and are open to interpretation, since there is no narration or explanation of the final product.
Art is an universal language and it can reflect our deepest hopes and fears. It is also a form
of connecting with others without using words, directly jumping over a language barrier.
Enjoy the following pieces and take this opportunity to reflect on The Lens of the Other.
EUROPEAN YOUTH TOGETHER
This website was created in the context of the project “Through the Lens of the Other”,
European Youth Together, KA3 of the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union,
604877-EPP-1-2018-1-EL-EPPKA3-EU-YTH-TOG.
The European Comission’s support for the production of this work does not constitute an
endorsement of the contents, which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Comission cannot be held responsible for any use which be made of the information contained therein.
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