From detention centers to informal camps, hotspots In slums, they wait in uncertainty, stuck between two administrative procedures, between two countries, between two lives.

The painful journey of exiles begins with compulsion, with the need to flee. It continues with inevitable and risky crossings. Exiles get lost in the Sahelian desert and suffer the blows of traffickers. They crash on European borders and are damaged by making themselves invisible. It is their uniqueness that sinks in the Mediterranean, their identity that is erased when they burn their fingertips to erase their fingerprints.

Not a day goes by without the news telling us about exiles. Not a day when the terrible figures of deaths in the Mediterranean or the stories of tragic events that occurred at the borders of Europe do not emerge. Not a day goes by without images of distress illustrating abstract statistics.

These images are not enough. Faced with the injustice of naming exiles only “clandestine”, “undocumented” or “foreigners”, it is important to make them visible. And representations, whatever their forms, contribute to this lifting of anonymity. This is what Fred Kleinberg's works offer. They transform the invisible into remarkable individuals.

As citizens as we are, those who are trying to repair survivors, are not resigned. Exiles want to be alive and visible. They want to form a common society with us and we are at their side in a citizen struggle. A fight for human rights to be respected. Because there is an ethical imperative here: to restore to the exiles their full and complete “humanity”.

We must therefore celebrate them, celebrate their courage, their tenacity. For this, but also to fight against ignorance and fear, artists work to transfigure every detail of the exiles' journey, knowing how to transform a shelter into a warm space or a camp where existences are suspended into a space of utopia. Behind Fred Kleinberg's creations, through the odyssey in which he traces the flight lines and obstacles, urgent human and social questions unavoidably arise for which political answers are lacking. May creation, then, inspire our leaders.

Doctor Françoise Sivignon, 2017
President of Médecins du Monde France.

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