Human Flow

Stories from the Global Refugee Crisis

Ai Weiwei, Boris Cheshirkov, Ryan Heath, Chin-chin Yap, Boris Cheshirkov, Ryan Heath, Chin-chin Yap, Hanno Hauenstein

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691208060
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunst & Politik

A powerful portrait of the greatest humanitarian emergency of our time, from the director of Human Flow In the course of making Human Flow, his epic feature documentary about the global refugee crisis, the artist Ai Weiwei and his collaborators interviewed more than 600 refugees, aid workers, politicians, activists, doctors, and local authorities in twenty-three countries around the world. A handful of those interviews were included in the film. This book presents one hundred of these conversations in their entirety, providing compelling first-person stories of the lives of those affected by the crisis and those on the front lines of working to address its immense challenges.Speaking in their own words, refugees give voice to their experiences of migrating across borders, living in refugee camps, and struggling to rebuild their lives in unfamiliar and uncertain surroundings. They talk about the dire circumstances that drove them to migrate, whether war, famine, or persecution; and their hopes and fears for the future. A wide range of related voices provides context for the historical evolution of this crisis, the challenges for regions and states, and the options for moving forward.Complete with photographs taken by Ai Weiwei while filming Human Flow, this book provides a powerful, personal, and moving account of the most urgent humanitarian crisis of our time.

Human Flow
Stories from the Global Refugee Crisis

001

Pascal Thirion, Tempelhof Management
Tempelhof Refugee Camp, Berlin, Germany, 2015-12-16 and 2016-02-09

AW:	What’s the history of this building?
PT:	It has a difficult history, but it’s a very special place for me and for many people. We’re in the main hall of the former Tempelhof airport, an incredible old structure that ceased functioning as an airport in 2008—not a long time ago—but, since then, many things have happened.
	The building was constructed in 1938, during Hitler’s time. We’re in a space full of history, good and bad. When the airport stopped being an airport, nobody really knew what function it would assume. The first thing that happened was that we started hosting events here. We had a big fashion show and some smaller events, which was a good way to open up these spaces to the public, otherwise the building would’ve been closed. You could feel that something special was happening here.
	Not being German, I always felt Berlin was very different from other German cities. I came here because I knew this place from about thirty years ago. At that time Berlin was still occupied by American, French, and British military forces, and the wall was still there. This airport was run mainly by the US Air Force, so in one half of the building, it was like being in the US and the other half of the building was a normal public airport. My parents were working for the military, so I was able to walk in all these spaces. Of course, if you come to Berlin as a foreigner, you want to know a lot about the city.
	You probably know how and why the airport was built, what happened with it when the war was over, and how it was used for people coming from East Germany or East Berlin. At that time, the wall wasn’t built yet. It was the only way to get to West Germany, an orderly way to get out of the city.
	I came here because I knew that Berlin was becoming more of a truly international city. I was privileged to work in many huge cities all over the world before coming to Berlin: in South America, the US, the Middle East. There’s still a gap when you compare Berlin to other big cities outside of Europe. When talking about a city in Asia, you’re talking about millions of people, but if you talk about a big city in Germany, it’s still small compared to the megacities in the world.
	What I saw in all these cities—Shanghai, Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong, or even Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, and Moscow—was the challenge of accommodating all these people in adequate spaces. This was the specific reason why I thought Tempelhof could become a special place for Berlin and for Germany. When you have a large, open space like this, you have the possibility of creating new things because you don’t have to work within a framework. People can come here and decide what they want to do. They can create the space they want to have. Inside these larger spaces, things can happen that could probably never happen somewhere else.
AW:	What’s the current condition of the camp?
PT:	When I came here the objective was just to rent out spaces that could be used to earn a bit of money to contribute to its huge maintenance cost. We started by sponsoring commercial events. We had about eighty commercial events every year. The number and size increased exponentially. We had huge events that had never before happened in Germany. In the past five to ten years, we’ve seen more of a mix between commercial and cultural events. We have huge halls here—seven hangars where aircraft were maintained in the past.
	Last year more refugees were coming to Germany. Last summer, people were already looking to Tempelhof: if we couldn’t open spaces for refugees to live in, at least they could have a place to sleep. But you can’t take refugees and put them in a hangar, because it’s cold and windy; it’s very nice for art shows or parties, but it isn’t really a living space. We said, “Please, even if you can imagine living here in the summer, what’s going to happen when it starts getting colder?” The hangars don’t have heating or sanitary systems.
	Normally there are twenty-five to fifty people working at Tempelhof, but now there are about 500 to 600 people living there. It wasn’t easy to imagine how that transformation would unfold. Every night 500, 600, 700, even 800 people came to Berlin; every single night the city needed at least 700 new beds. It was only a matter of time before we had to open the hangars for refugees.
	To be honest, in spite of having a few people who were specialists in organizing events, hosting refugees is a totally different situation than hosting a party where everything is ready at a certain time and then it’s over and you tear everything down. The hangar has everything in place to host people at events—sanitary installations, lights, sound, a heating system, and so on—but holding temporary events is a completely different project than providing accommodation for refugees. Nobody knew exactly what was going to happen: Would people be there for a week, a month, a year? There simply wasn’t enough time to prepare for this large influx of people.
	Another issue we ran into is that there were many other organizations involved in this process. Could we work with them? Could they work with us? In the beginning everybody was full of energy. They came to Tempelhof and were fascinated with this space. Everybody thought, Wow, look at this … this will become the best shelter ever. You could feel the energy and history; you knew something very special was going to happen. But again, running a shelter or working with this very complicated issue of refugees is totally different. You know that every day you have to do so much more to offer better and more comfortable spaces, and at the end of the day, it’s not happening at the speed that everybody wants it to happen. Every day it’s like you’re opening a new book. You’re still in the same story but you don’t really know what’s going to happen, because you’re a part of something that’s happening worldwide.
	Tempelhof is unique because of its enormous size. If you go to Jordan or Turkey, there are shelters for more than 100,000 people, but those in modern Western cities can’t imagine 20,000 people in terms of size, smell, noise, and needs living together in a small space. Berlin had to create space for 70,000 people last year. They all came, more or less, at the same time. Of course, nobody can be prepared to offer that many people housing, but you have to take care of their needs, including social work and health care. The other difficulty is that everyone came from regions where they don’t really like one another for religious or political reasons. Now they’re all put together into one small space. How do we deal with the fallout of this?
	When the company Tamaja opened the first hangar, there were about 500 people living there. We had to put them in tents because it wasn’t possible to set up other rooms for them. So we opened one hangar, then another, and now there are four open hangars with about 2,000 refugees living in them. The hangars could probably fit many more, but that’s not working at this time. It’s a huge logistics operation. At the end of t...