Europa Dreaming: Yearning for Europe from the Brenner Pass

What happens to the European dream when it meets the dream of migrants? Is this Europe, raising external barriers and restoring internal borders, still responding to the ideals and values on which it was founded? Is it possible to protect our achievements - freedom, respect of human rights and welfare - without denying them to others? With these questions in mind, an interdisciplinary team was established in 2015 at the Free University of Bolzano to observe what was happening in Europe from a specific vantage point – the border between Italy and Austria at Brenner. Its aim was to point to the lack of shared migration policies and to reposition the so-called migrant-crisis on a wider timescale than the short-term perspective of a perceived emergency. The impression was that the crisis concerned the institution of Europe itself, its values, principles and policies, rather than the fortuitous circumstances of protecting and relocating refugees. The results of this observatory are collected in the web-project Europa Dreaming, published online in 2016. This book expands and develops the contents of this visual journalism project and serves as a retrospective reflection on the design process behind it.