It implodes, it explodes, it falls apart
Jul 19, 11:27 AM
January 26, 2022
NGO visit to a refugee rest house near Batrovci, Serbia
On the backroad there is no light, so I do not know, then, from where the shadows come, how they project against the rear windowpane of the van, vaguely humanoid, cutting a steady path like a family in flight across the Pannonian Plain, the Aegean Sea, the Rio Grande.
The house, not a home, is not empty but neither can it be called full. When our van comes down the road, sticks its wheels in the mud, parks below the blown-out windows canvassed in tarp, I imagine it causes them some panic. But the men, they welcome us in. We ask them questions, we ask them if they’d like to ask us questions — they don’t — we look at the sleeping bags and the etchings on the exposed stone and watch our breath come to life in the winter air.
They come outside with us. We open the van, turn on the light, which is so cutting and clear in the dark that the scene now resembles a play on a theater stage. In the night this is the only sound and the only sight — bright light, English, Serbian, Pashto, Farsi, boxes thudding, here are jackets, here are boots, manana, tashakor, assailamu alaikom, best of luck to you, my friends.
And so I am trying to decide if here — at the border, where paths parallel for millennia become perpendicular — the world is collapsing in on itself or, rather, bursting forth in a million new directions.
This is where it happens. The logic of the world: it implodes, it explodes, it falls apart.
Recorded by Zach Goodwin.
Part of the Migration Sounds project, the world’s first collection of the sounds of human migration.
For more information and to explore the project, see https://www.citiesandmemory.com/migration
NGO visit to a refugee rest house near Batrovci, Serbia
On the backroad there is no light, so I do not know, then, from where the shadows come, how they project against the rear windowpane of the van, vaguely humanoid, cutting a steady path like a family in flight across the Pannonian Plain, the Aegean Sea, the Rio Grande.
The house, not a home, is not empty but neither can it be called full. When our van comes down the road, sticks its wheels in the mud, parks below the blown-out windows canvassed in tarp, I imagine it causes them some panic. But the men, they welcome us in. We ask them questions, we ask them if they’d like to ask us questions — they don’t — we look at the sleeping bags and the etchings on the exposed stone and watch our breath come to life in the winter air.
They come outside with us. We open the van, turn on the light, which is so cutting and clear in the dark that the scene now resembles a play on a theater stage. In the night this is the only sound and the only sight — bright light, English, Serbian, Pashto, Farsi, boxes thudding, here are jackets, here are boots, manana, tashakor, assailamu alaikom, best of luck to you, my friends.
And so I am trying to decide if here — at the border, where paths parallel for millennia become perpendicular — the world is collapsing in on itself or, rather, bursting forth in a million new directions.
This is where it happens. The logic of the world: it implodes, it explodes, it falls apart.
Recorded by Zach Goodwin.
Part of the Migration Sounds project, the world’s first collection of the sounds of human migration.
For more information and to explore the project, see https://www.citiesandmemory.com/migration