DROWNED (Spain, 2007-2009)

Week in, week out they take the gamble: Africans who hope to reach the Canary Islands in rickety little boats – and with the Islands, Europe. Some succeed, many drown. Seba Kurtis’s photo series DROWNED is a tart commentary on the fate of illegal refugees. The photographer, who himself lived for years in Spain as an ‘illegal’, threw his photo material into the sea along the coast of the Canary Islands, and presents only the images that ‘survived’, mutilated, blurred and literally washed out, an echo of his own family photos that years before he had been able to save from a flood. In this way Kurtis confronts us with the human dimension of the issue of illegal immigration, not as a detached outsider, but as an emotionally involved individual, who has experienced first-hand that ‘home’ is a flexible concept, something that takes a middle ground between a dream and a memory.