The Expecting Game

This statement is from Marco Panzetti: “We Are Not Going Back”...

During the summer of 2015, in the context of the largest refugee crisis since World War II, the flow of migrants reaching Italy by boat and headed overland for northern Europe is abruptly interrupted by the closure of the French border on June the 8th 2015. Within a few days, near the Italian border town of Ventimiliglia, a crowd of 200-300 migrants is formed. On June the 11th the Italian police attempts to forcibly deport them. Many resist and take shelter on the rocks, creating a makeshift camp a few meters from the posh French Riviera town of Menton.

Among infinite dreams, stories, hopes and uncertainties, one thing is clear above all: nobody is going back.

       
This image of a pregnant African woman is Not by Marco Panzetti… but he begins his photo essay at The BBC similarly, with a silhouette of an African woman at a north Italian refugee camp….

The BBC sets an image here, beginning a series of them by Panzetti, showing Africans in a north Italy migrant camp…

Caption, “Life goes on: Mohamed Fatima from Mali, who is pregnant, is waiting for her case to be processed so she can move on from Fenoglio camp.”

BBC, “The waiting game: Life in a north Italy migrant camp”, 16 Sept 2017:

About 100,000 people have arrived on Italian shores this year, after making the perilous journey across the Mediterranean from Libya.

They are joining many thousands more asylum seekers and migrants already in the country - many stuck there after other European countries closed their borders.

About 450 of them can be found in the Fenoglio camp, outside Turin, which is run by the Italian Red Cross.

It is supposed to be a transit camp, from where migrants are quickly transferred to reception centres - but the logjam in the system means many end up spending months here.

Photographer Marco Panzetti met the inhabitants of the camp on behalf of the Red Cross….