Walking from Buzet (Croatia) to Trieste (Italy) – the area of the northern section of the Balkan migrant route – with an interdisciplinary group of researchers, artist, and a person with the experience of walking the Balkan migrant route, an experienced “gamer”, everybody was taking photos. Only a few were writing or drawing. This is not really surprising, given that today we are into taking photos more than ever before, researchers being no exception. It’s easy and convenient. We click, save and share. But what do we take pictures of? What should or shouldn’t we document, save, and expose, as we walk through the territory where northern sections of Balkan migrant route pass? And what guided the editing and the selection process behind this photo essay? Considering the thoughts of Yannis Hamilakis (2021) about the danger of aestheticization or about deliberate obscuring of material, social and political conditions behind migration, this is not an easy task.
Going through our fieldwork photos and essays, written a few weeks after our walking seminar, one quickly notices that it is the objects, the trash or personal belongings, left by migrants that represent the majority of our clicks. The texts, too, speak about ‘things’, for instance about the things that have been lost or left behind and what to do about them. In one way or another, they all ruminate about how to understand and call these objects, how to grasp the essence of things imminently elusive; they ponder about the nature of (counter)archives, about what is exposed and what hidden; they quiz over the stories told by objects, all the while thinking about ethical dilemmas too. If objects are at the forefront of our clicks, questions surely dominate our essays. This one as well.1Photo essay edited by Urša Kanjir. Authors of quotes and photos: Primož Pipan, Nataša Rogelja, Lucija Klun, Jure Gombač, Urša Kanjir
