Giulia Spinicci
I wanted to take part to this project firstly because I liked the idea of meeting like minded people from different backgrounds and I wanted to see how we could all inspire each other and work together. I am also interested in the idea of social justice in general and, while I have had some previous experience with comics, I was looking forward to applying this medium to a more serious and complex project.
I hope to improve my skills in communicating with comics and to keep being inspired and possibly inspire my fellow artists.
The aim of my project is to explore in different ways what it means to migrate. I’ve chosen to focus on a specific geographical area, the Balkans, because both in the past and the present day it has been a place heavily impacted by migration. Initially my project was supposed to be an attempt to prove that no matter the reason, throughout history people have always been crossing borders and that the contemporary “migration crisis” is not such an unheard-of phenomenon in these parts of the world. However, during the first workshop I realized that more than answers I had questions on this topic. The more I researched the more I realized how complex and how utterly unpredictable human migration_ and the reasons behind it_ can be. Therefore, now my aim is to work on different layers of migration. Broadly speaking to migrate means to leave the one place we know to move to another place. In that sense my journey of research will inevitably lead me to another level of understanding of the migrating phenomenon in the Balkans.
The first part of my project will mainly involve research on the Balkans migration. I intend to approach the
subject from different angles and media, so I will use books, reportage, poetry and anything that might help
me in deepening my understanding of the subject. The second part of the project will entail a selection of the stories
and data I will have collected. In the end I would like to create a sort of “travel diary” that will reflect the layered experience
of both kind of “migration”: the physical and metaphorical one.
The title of my project is a pun on the old English riddle-joke, “why did the chicken cross the road?” (the answer is: “to get on the other side”). This joke, with its apparently weird setup, is an example of anti-humor because it is answered by a very reasonable and anticlimactic explanation. I decided to change it in “why did the chicken cross the border” to stress the sensationalist tone often used by the international press when speaking about the migration crisis.