Background
Over the past 20 years, hundreds of thousands of people from Africa and the Middle East have left their homes in search of a better life in Europe, hoping to find peace and freedom.
The right to asylum is protected by the Geneva Convention and the constitutional rights of European countries. However, the policies of closed borders, also known as ‘Fortress Europe’, and the resulting lack of any legal way to enter the EU force those in need to take risky and potentially fatal routes to seek asylum.
These circumstances have led to the deaths of thousands of people, with more than 18,000 dying between 2009 and 2016 alone. Counting the Dead reveals the interdependencies and commemorates the victims of this human-made tragedy.
The Project
Instead of classical cartography, the installation used an experimental 3D projection to show all these incidents in relation to your current location in Cologne, including distance and direction on a compass, as well as the years 2009–2016. A digital interface then provided access to more information about each incident. The dataset used for this is openly available online and was created by a group of journalists who have been collecting individual media reports as sources since 2009. Unfortunately, they had to discontinue their work in 2016 (www.themigrantsfiles.com).
While this reprocessing of the raw data allows for new interpretations of location, frequency and regularity, it is difficult to process this large amount of data emotionally.
To address this, photos and videos that people already know from the media were implemented in the same projection and interface to create a link and emotional context. All the media was collected me and can be found on the public internet.
