Visual research consultant
I joined the project as a visual research consultant to support in thinking visually, from thinking about possible outputs, through to filming and editing the many short videos. It was such a privilege to be part of the process from beginning to end. I could contribute through my background in visual storytelling and migration, while learning from the researchers who were doing much of the heavy lifting.
The intensity of research
For me, the genius of the project lay in its simple but profound premise: people continue to live their lives even if there is little legal pathway to do so. It was sometimes painful, but always fascinating, to learn how people navigate that tension. While working on this project, I was also doing a PhD research on depopulation in Italy. One day, I would be in an abandoned village, and mere days later, I would find myself walking through an overcrowded cemetery in the Netherlands discussing the difficulty of finding space for the dead. As my research was running parallel with this project, I often found myself wondering about these kinds of strange synchronisms that were taking place in different parts of the world. In all, what stands out to me is not one moment, but the sheer intensity of diving into the complexity of the research, the intimacy of participants’ stories, and the effort to do justice to them, all during short bursts of travel to Morocco and the Netherlands.
We began with some pretty wild ideas for the visual output, but the pandemic forced us to adapt constantly. I’m proud that, amidst uncertainty, we nevertheless created an extensive body of work that reflects our team’s spirit, the messiness of ethnography, and offers a deeply personal glimpse into the ways laws, norms, and procedures affect lives.