This work illustrates the process of making tough and sometimes impossible choices, like those that immigrants make. It is fluid, the reasons pro and contra can change and can move from one scale pan to the other. It is adjustable. It can, therefore, be used for other difficult and sometimes impossible choices: do I want to change my job? do I want children? should I start studying again? etc.
“I was born in a country where I don’t want to live. The country where I do want to live doesn’t want me.”
“The organizations/people who judge you ‘if you are a refugee or not’ are doing a bad job, there’s a lot of disbelief and disinformation. It was really hard for us to prove we were running from the war and our people were being slaughtered.”
“I am too scared and lazy to start the process of immigration even though I’ve been striving to do so for almost all my life.”
"I’ve never regret this decision.”
“I don’t want to live in a third world country, with no future.”
In 2015-2016 Anyuta conducted a sociological research (together with a sociologist Vladimir Ponizovsky) where she addressed people who, like herself, were considering to move to another country or have already made this decision.
In sociological literature and official statistics migrants are classified according to a set of possible reasons: marriage migrants, financial migrants, climate migrants, refugees (people who flew their home country due to their life or health being put in danger).
In this work Anyuta originally addressed the people who do not necessarily fit these fixed categories. From the conducted research she gathered a number of pro’s and contra’s that people consider when making a decision to leave their home country (including but not limited to love, money, climate, war) and asked the participants to rank the reasons relevant to them from the least to the most important. Further, the reasons were “attached” a “weight” accordingly. Every reason has been translated into an object, the attached weight was taken into account.
Publication with the survey results is available here.
Thanks to Joeri Thiry for the photographs from the performance at STUK as a part of PLAYGROUND Festival.
