”I know the dangers of the journey. There is dead all along the road.”
Boubacar, 20-year-old clandestine migrant upon his departure towards Europe. 
 
 
CLANDESTINE is a story about life and death. It is the story of men who risk everything in order to provide a better future for their families.
 
The project CLANDESTINE is an ongoing documentary project about clandestine migration from West Africa to Europe. It is a photographic account of the long and perilous journey, undertaken by young african men, through the vast expanses of the Sahara, across the hostile waves of the ocean and into a foreign continent, Europe.
 
CLANDESTINE is an intimate investigation of men who must denounce themselves and become nobody in order to become somebody and how, as the journey unfolds, they are progressively stripped from their human rights and become naked lives or outcasts of modernity. In its essence, CLANDESTINE is a project about prolonged human liminality. The immediate drama of the actual crossing is mirrored in a profound psychological and symbolic journey. The crossing represents a rite of transition, in which the young migrants become suspended in an existential no man’s land. Between adolescence and adulthood. Between the familiar and the foreign. Between Africa and Europe. Between life and death.
 
CLANDESTINE portrays how the migrants navigate this marginal ‘space’ and how they cope with fear, loneliness, longing, shame and marginalisation during the journey, and in Europe. Thus, the project is a critique of a world order, in which the poor, who are increasingly constrained in their mobility, are forced to become ‘illegal’ in order to support their families.
 
This project began in 2006 when I did an international master in human rights in relation to undocumented migrants. I travelled to West Africa and followed a group of young men on their clandestine journey from their native village in northwestern Mali to Paris, France. In 2007 and 2008, I returned to Paris to visit some of those who made the journey. In 2009 I returned to West Africa, and I am presently in Paris, France working closely with a small group of ’undocumented’ migrants to portray their everyday life, and the constant fear of the police, the immigration authorities as well as their yearning for their families, and their homes in Africa.
 
Later this year, I plan to return to the Kayes region in northeastern Mali to visit families of the departed, parents, wives and children who are ’left behind’. My focus will be to document not only the effects of migrant remittances, but in a more profound way, how it is to live without the presence or even knowledge of the whereabouts, of one’s son, husband, brother or father.
 
The end-product is a book containing images and text essays with a strong focus on the narratives and life stories of the migrants and their families as well as their personal maps, drawings, poems, diaries, e-mail correspondances, family photos and newspaper clippings. The book will contain two separate but mutually interrelated components: the actual images and visual components, as well as an updated and re-edited version of my master’s thesis on human rights and clandestine migration. That way, the project will appeal equally to academic and non-academic audiences. To the general public as well as human rights professionals and political decision-makers at large.

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