Experience
WATCH
What happens when undocumented Bangladeshi and Pakistani men in Greece pick up their cell phones to record their working and living conditions? Their videos and images are “evidence” of their lived reality. Craig Berggold, a team member and himself a labour activist who has done the 3-D jobs himself, sorted the large body of images and videos that the migrant men had taken into two main themes, namely, Work Conditions and Living Conditions. Each is approximately 12 minutes long. Music and audio that you hear in the simple soundtrack is drawn from video files that the men sent and/or that they provided.
Working Conditions reveal processes of migration, detention, and the men’s labour precarity in agriculture.
The second video, Living Conditions, focuses on their complex lives off the working arena and on the uninhabitable plastic shacks that they are forced to call home for several months in a year.
LISTEN
The soundscape for the exhibition has been created by Andie Winsor using audio that the migrant men had shared for the Photovoice project. Some of the audio that was sent by the men includes sounds of their voices singing and speaking, the metro station and metro travel in Athens, and early morning sounds of rural Greece.
It also includes other sounds that Andie found on free audio sharing sites that were recorded at places that the migrant men might have passed during their migratory journey. These recordings were from the Middle East and Greece, found through the website Radio Aporee. Radio Aporee allows users to upload soundscapes from all over the World. Some examples of sounds used in this exhibition include waves against yachts from Kos, Greece, roosters and crickets near a river in Turkey, and winds in a desert in Abu Dhabi. Other sounds used in these soundscapes include the sound of a pressure cooker, footsteps in a forest, songs being played on a harmonium, trucks, chopping of vegetables, and breathing.
All of these recordings are split into four categories to paint a picture of the lives of the men featured in this exhibit: one to represent the metro station, one for living conditions, one for working conditions, and one for the dangerous and oftentimes fatal passage these men must take from Asia to Greece.
Combined binaural audio track: this has all four separate audio tracks combined to create a cohesive sonic immersive experience.
Urban worries: This track is primarily that of sounds taken from Athen’s urbanscape – streetsounds merging with those of the extensive metro system that migrants take to reach their work. The metro stations are also sites where Greek police often nabs racialized men who appear to not ‘fit’ in the profile of regulars. Thus, the metro is both a conduit to their livelihood and to their detention and deportation.
Working conditions: this audio track combines sound provided by the men and audio recorded on a farm in Ontario to create an ‘audio feel’ of the worksites. The fields are usually eerily silent with the men’s voices not heard speaking to each other due to their total focus on the demanding agricultural task, the fear of having the supervisor tick them off if they are caught speaking (and supposedly wasting work time), and because they have earphones to listen to music from their cellphones.
Passages: This audio track has been put together to recreate some of the sounds that the men encounter during their migratory journeys that are dangerous and filled with risks to their lives.