Replacement Migration – Portraits from the 21st Century



By Malene Nors Tardrup



The project Replacement Migration – Portraits from the 21st Century focuses on the cultural transformation and exchange taking place when people move from one culture to another. With this book, I want to elucidate changing identities and reflect on connections, differences and common dilemmas in the meeting between 'us' and 'them'. Through photo, text I portray people from Europe living in the Arab world and people from the Arab world living in Europe.



The book consists of 34 portraits of ‘average' men and women aged 20-65. They represent 16 different nationalities and reside in 11 different major cities in the Middle East and Europe. All the participants have grown up in their country of birth, and because they have come to their new homelands as adults, they have brought their own cultural backgrounds with them.



Replacement Migration – Portraits from the 21st Century, seek to stimulate reflection and curiosity in an attempt to view the experience of being a stranger from new angles or to challenge prevalent ideas about the familiar and the unknown. The work focuses on themes such as affiliation and cultural alienation, and they should be considered in light of the fact that we live in an age with new borders, new enemy images, new taboos and new frameworks of hospitality.



Visually as well, the project is based on an anthropological approach, since I depict these people and their stories in the environments they live in. In the photos we meet the persons, partly in public spaces to which they have a special relation or where they feel particularly at home and partly in their homes, in the private sphere they have created in the foreign culture. For some, it is important to make the home a safe and familiar base while others seek refuge in the public spaces of the city. The project raises the question of how a new identity is formed, at home and abroad, mentally as well as physically. Where and how does the stranger find relations, peace and tranquillity of mind in a new city, in a different culture? When the people portrayed open their homes to us and show us part of their living rooms and the life that unfolds in them, it gives us, as viewers, a close look into the personal way they have become integrated in a new culture.



Each portrait consists of two renditions of the same person along with a short text written by the person in question, briefly describing the experience of penetrating the surface of an unfamiliar city, getting to know it and making it one's own. Texts and photos, then, seek to create a complex image of the individual person in the hope that the multiplicity and variation of the portraits will be able to contribute to a better understanding between 'the Arabs' and 'the Europeans' and help break down the categories of 'them' and 'us'.



The people I have portrayed have shown me great hospitality and been most obliging right from the start. Just as I am grateful that they have been willing to let a stranger into their homes with an 'obtrusive' camera, they have appreciated the project which they have felt 'spoke up for them'.



With this book I want to provide a perspective on what it is like to be a stranger, but a perspective that is wider than what you usually find, e.g. in relation to the immigration controversy in the Danish public. Generally, the project Replacement Migration – Portraits from the 21st Century constitutes a portrait that does not focus on 'foreign immigrants' in a given country and the prejudices and reservations this could involve, but rather seeks to focus on the individual person and the experience of being a stranger.