The Passage

selma banich and Marijana Hameršak in collaboration with the Women to Women collective
The Passage
Memorial, mixed media
2021

In English

The Passage memorial is a collection of thirty-six portraits that form a mobile monument dedicated to those who have died at the borders and in the name of borders. By commemorating the lives of the people who have died on the Balkan migrant trail, whose lives were taken by the relentless European death regime, it paves the way for individual and collective healing – a passage from the normalization of border tragedies to communal learning, empowerment, and care.

The artistic, commemorative, and decolonial practice of The Passage memorial is a continuation of past fierce collaborations: the They Can’t Kill Us All protest banner, crafted for the International Women’s Day by the Women to Women collective and selma banich, and the Memorial Page launched by Transbalkan Solidarity in the summer of 2020. The Passage, conceptualized in collaboration with Marijana Hameršak, is based on the ethnographic fieldwork conducted within the project The European Irregularized Migration Regime in the Periphery of the EU: from Ethnography to Keywords.