THE PARALLEL CITIES PROJECT // 
Rome // Barcelona // Paris  




Parallel Cities is a storytelling project focused on the perspectives of young men who have migrated from countries in West Africa to the European Union. This project is a team effort between a female photographer born in America and a young man born in Senegal who collects and transcribes the testimonies, and in collaboration with a group of men in their 20’s and 30’s born in Mali, Senegal, The Gambia, Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Ivory Coast, and Burkina Faso.

Testimonies from the project’s participants are organized into ten chapters (five chapters describing “rejections” and five describing “desires”) that narrate the similarities structuring particpants’ experiences of social and physical displacement after arriving in the EU. Each chapter is described in a text that has been collectively written during workshops over the course of the past year. Author information is presented as initials, age group, preferred language, and country of birth. This website represents a small portion of the testimonies gathered over the past years.

During workshops lasting several months, testimonies are paired with site-specific photographs of spaces that participants have been socially or physically displaced from, such as touristic sites in city centers, sites of previous outdoor encampments, and neighborhoods. Conceptual methods are incorporated in order to adequately respond to concerns over the protection of participants’ identities, surveillance measures by police, recent security bills limiting the online dissemination of images of police officers, and in order to take into account participants’ past experiences of being filmed or photographed by journalists without permission.

During the workshops, basic lighting and composition in photography is demonstrated to participants. Future editions of the workshops will involve participants contributing photographs they have taken with disposable cameras and mobile phones.

These photographs have been exhibited in two formats: (1) a
s a series of triptychs meant to partially demonstrate the spatial experience of the testimony each is paired with, and (2) as a series of postcards, either sent through the mail to the exhibition location or displayed with collected stamps, often from the author’s country of origin and with designs that signify ties to European countries, sometimes dating from colonial periods.

Each photograph or series of photographs is transformed through the transfer of an author’s recent memory in his own words, becoming a unique artifact that its author claims ownership of. By transcribing his words onto a photograph, we produce an object that belongs to the author of each memory – because the memory belongs to him – in spite of the systems in place that prevent him from gaining wealth and property in Southern European countries.

The project will produce an alternative platform for communicating on the contemporary experiences of migrants in Southern European cities. It highlights the needs of migrants, shifting focus to their own perceptions and urban experiences in contrast to journalism that is too often narrated from and for outside perspectives and that too often focuses on exposing and objectifying the intimate details of migrants’ identities.

Above all, the project is a call to critically engage the voices of migrants in constructive conversations about what should change in the present to improve conditions for migrants now and in the future. In order for any critical conversation to happen, their participation through alternative forums and new methods is paramount.



© 2022 The Parallel Cities Project