Immigrantopolis (polis= πόλις is the greek word for the “city”)
The “Immigrantopolis” Project aims at visualizing the existence and presence of immigrants in urban ‘Athens’ space through their places of worship, everyday life, celebrations and all kind of activity. The project is also a part of attempts to find new ways of exhibiting and discussing the present and the future of immigrants as an urban phenomenon. Tried to record that invisible network within the city, basements and rented flats, apartment blocks and garages, playing fields and outdoor public spaces, squares and courtyards, structures made in temporary or permanent addresses for Ethnic groups.
Every person at these photos is an immigrant or a refugee. Till now the nationalities that are involved in this invisible network within the city are from Pakistan, Brazil, Indians Sikh, Bulgaria, Eritrean, Mexico, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Congo, Russian and many others. The project lasts from 2017 and is a work in progress with the collaboration of these communities members themselves and with the utmost respect for their identities…
It was quite rare until recent years to combine the subject of the city with a phenomenon of presence of immigrants in urban space. In other words, I would like the recipient to confront the immigrant reality in the urban space and make it more familiar to him. The “Immigrantopolis” project, pays attention to the subject of presence of immigrants in urban space as well as to give a closer look at the short presentation of achievements of migration photography. Immigrants have long been actors of the urban scene. In general they settle mainly in cities, they build their own ethnic communities in these cities, they create ethnic infrastructure in urban space, they enter into the urban landscape, transforming it constantly, and finally becoming a part of local/urban collective memory. Immigrants create history and contemporary social reality of the cities. It is impossible to delineate and capture the image of the contemporary city without capturing its immigrants contexts.
