1. Clandestine (1st PRIZE WINNER) (Christian Vium)

”Here in Mali there is nothing to eat. Nothing. If you don’t go out on adventure, you won’t make it for long. I can’t make any money in my village and I have lost all hope. So, I decided to leave for Europe. I love Europe. In Europe, there is work. You can find money there.”

(Sambala, 21-year-old migrant interviewed in northeastern Mali, while traversing the Sahara aspiring to enter Algeria).

Sambala, 21, is from the region of Kayes in Mali. He is on the way to Italy via Libya, where he hopes to find work and support his family. He owns no more than the belongings seen on the photo. Sambala expects the journey to take no less than two years. This photo was taken in the Sahara desert, 600 kilometres north of the city of Gao in north eastern Mali. 24 hours later, Sambala was the only of twelve clandestine migrants who made it across the border into Algeria. The remaining 11 where withheld by the border police for questioning. In 2006, around 30,000 clandestine migrants arrived in the Canary Islands alone. The number of people who died in the attempt to reach Europe is unknown. These ”outcasts of modernity”, travel thousands of kilometres, risking their lives in the attempt to reach Europe. They do so, because they are poor, because they see no alternative way of ensuring the survival of their families. In the West African country Mali, the third poorest country in the world, it is estimated that 70 percent of the population survive on less than $1 a day. Unable to find employment, move beyond poverty and become breadwinners and thus respected as adults in their home environment, young men in the thousands take to the road in a desperate attempt to win their life, and ensure the survival of their families. But they are not welcome in Europe. Immigration and asylum laws have attained an increasingly strict and exclusive character. With no means of entering in a legal way, the migrants are forced embark on even more dangerous journeys, and travel in secrecy. In West Africa, these migrants are known as Adventurers. In many local contexts their long and perilous journey towards Europe has become a cultural imperative that serves as a potential rite of passage, in which the young man becomes suspended in an existential terrain vague between adolescence and adulthood. He becomes stripped of his former identity and enters a liminal sphere, devoid of socio-cultural references and order. He becomes betwixt and between. A ”bare life” without human rights and without value. The clandestine migrant is suspended between home and abroad, between adolescence and adulthood, in a state of (permanent) exception. Maybe Sambala has reached Italy, maybe he is stuck somewhere in Libya, or maybe he has been sent back to Mali. Judging from his persistence, I would guess he has made it to Europe. He might be the one cleaning our metro, emptying our garbage or constructing our houses. Like thousands of other “illegal” immigrants who live a life in the shadows, far from their beloved ones.