Lucija Klun and Jernej Mlekuž
People have moved and are still moving in all directions, south and north, across great oceans and to nearby cities, for money and for love… And they use different means of transport: cars, planes, ships, trains … and their feet. Migrants today, who have to use their feet to move, are undoubtedly the most deprivileged, marginalised, hidden, vulnerable and often problematised group of migrants. It has not always been so. The masses of people migrating from the old world to the new often walked to the first railway tracks or stations. The difference is that some do it “legally”, others “illegally”, some hiding behind the hand of justice, others…
Walking or following today’s migrant trails raises many questions, including or especially ethical ones. Today’s migrant walker is out of the landscape, crossing it unnoticed in the gloom and thicket – to be seen is the bitterest of fates. We by day, they by night, we the talkers, they the silent ones, we the contact seekers and environmental disturbers, they the evaders, the agile and fierce “fugitives” from human contact, the villagers with pernicious ties to the local police station.
But walking the migrant paths, the paths that migrants walk and have walked, is often the only way to understand, or more precisely to feel, migration as an act of moving (bipedal) bodies, thoughts, desires, feelings and everything else that makes homo sapiens unique on the planet.