‘If I could …’, since 2014

If we could fly, there would be no boarders. No desert to wide, no ocean to deep, no wall to high.

When I was travelling from Calais to Dover one summer I came upon a sad, almost surreal scenery. Hundreds of refugees waiting to find a way to get to England no matter how. This people, after having had a very long, very hard and dangerous journey are now stuck in Calais, hunted by the police and utterly desperate to cross the strictly protected border to the UK and risk their lives again.

This made me think about the life of a refugee especially as a woman, which is even tougher.

I’ve been visiting the women center in Calais and the jungles where refugees live without any shelter to talk to refugees about their journeys, their lives and hopes.

That gave me the idea of woman portraits and birds. How would it be to be able to move without boundaries.

The series ‘If I could …’ is composed of small drawn portraits of women with birds (pencil, ink and collage), an installation out of paper birds with messages from people who had to leave their home, and a video, that shows the border of water.