EUROPA?, by Chris Burkham & Ignacio Evangelista

The Instituto Cervantes Manchester presents the book EUROPA? a collaboration between Ignacio Evangelista, a Spanish photographer, and the British writer Chris Burkham; combining photography and fiction to examine the experiences of modern European migrants.

Ignacio Evangelista’s haunting photographic series ‘After Schengen’ shows abandoned and disused European border crossings following 1985’s Schengen Agreement. Writer Chris Burkham saw these photos in the UK’s Independent on Sunday newspaper, and the result is EUROPA?; a hybrid collection of images and fiction.Burkham’s short stories ask who makes these journeys after-Schengen and peoples Evangelista’s images with characters and their narratives that explore possibility, fear, hope and unease; playing on the notion of perpetual flux that is a central part of the European experiment. Avoiding the prevalent accounts of refugees escaping war zones; instead the book focuses on the peripheral, the migrants who continually criss-cross these arbitrary lines on the map.