21/11/2024
N°36 – Choosing death
Over the past twenty years, Jean-Jacques has accompanied around twenty people in their suicides through the Swiss association Exit, which he has been a member of since 2000 and co-president since 2018. For him, helping people like Suzanne to “leave a life that no longer resembles life” is an obvious choice, and an experience that has made him more serene and attentive to others.
21/11/2024
N°35 – Blue belt
Nadya is a 29-year old journalist and video maker. Originally from Moscow, she is currently working in exile. She has been doing Brazilian jiu jitsu on and off for 2,5 years and holds a white belt (the beginning rank) with four stripes, one stripe short of the blue belt.
21/11/2024
N°34 – Sam’s way
Samuel is a cattle farmer in the north of the Auvergne region. Passionate about his profession, he is waging a peaceful battle against the industrial superpowers, in favour of autonomous, ecological agriculture that cares about the welfare of animals, the living conditions of farmers and the health of consumers. He calls his philosophy “sensiculture”: the cultivation of common sense.
21/11/2024
N°33 – In the name of the father and the brother
Fausta is the daughter, sister, niece and wife of Guinean opponents repressed by the dictatorship of Teodoro Obiang. She herself is a fighter for freedom and against the impunity of a tyranny that has been in power since 1979. She has been living in exile in Madrid for seven years and is one of the initiators of a lawsuit in the Spanish National Court for the kidnapping of four activists, including her brother Martín.
20/11/2024
N°32 – The Attraction of Evil
23/09/2024
N°31 – The list
Ana is 27 and lives in Tbilisi, Georgia. She works for two queer-feminist organisations and for the the largest civil society movement in her country. All three organisations, as well as Ana and her colleagues personally, are at risk of being labelled “Foreign Agents”, since the Georgian government adopted a replication of a repressive Russian law. She talks about her fight against this law.
29/07/2024
N°30 – The Rime of The Ancient Mariner
Vincenzo is a fisherman who lives in Sapri, a village of 6,000 inhabitants in southern Italy. Despite his love for the profession that his family has practised for generations, he dreams of a different life for his children. Between regulations and climate change, making a living as small-scale fishermen has become almost impossible.
15/07/2024
N°29 – Aiming for the Games
Louise is a driven woman who always pushes herself to excel. At the moment, she is preparing for the Paralympics, but already needs to plan for the next move in her career –all of that, whilst living with a disability.
01/07/2024
N°28 – Down and Out in Paris
Fode*, a 15-year-old Guinean, arrived in Paris in September after crossing the Mediterranean. Now, like most unaccompanied minors, he finds himself in a legal limbo where the authorities won’t look after him, in conditions that are harsher than he could ever have imagined.
17/06/2024
N°27 – After laughter
Olga is 35 years old and lives in Kyiv, Ukraine. She has been working as a clown in hospitals in Kyiv for more than five years. In March 2023, with her colleague Marina she co-founded an NGO called БУП. With the Italian organisation Soccorso Clowns, under the mentorship of her teacher, Vladimir Olshansky, they teach clowns all over Europe.
13/06/2024
N°26 – Money, money, money…
Marlene is 32 years old and one of the ‘extremely rich’, having inherited her multi-millionaire grandmother’s fortune. For years, she has been thinking about how to redistribute this wealth. Iin 2024 she officially launched the Guter Rat: an assembly of 50 citizens pulled out of a hat to decide together on the best ways of democratically giving her fortune back to society.
13/06/2024
N°25 – Rain or shine
Joseph is 56 years old. He comes from a long line of Maltese farmers. Because of climate change, he has had to change the pace of his planting and invest in huge reservoirs to cope with the drought affecting the country. But that doesn’t stop him from worrying about the future of the island’s land and its farmers.
06/05/2024
N°24 – The battle of the elders
Anne is a long-standing environmental activist. During her career as an elected representative, she found that “political courage was variable”. So after her last mandate in 2015, she joined forces with Elders for the Climate in a long and victorious legal battle, which took this association of women over 64, to the European Court of Human Rights.
22/04/2024
N°23 – Lives in boxes
Valerius is the owner of a moving company. He was born in Belarus but came to Germany when he was 18 as a Spätaussiedler, which means he is a German emigrant who returned to Germany long after his family left the country.
10/04/2024
N°22 – From civil disobedience to parliament
Sylvia, a 49-year-old carpenter, lives in Dortmund with her two children. One year ago, she joined Letzte Generation (Last Generation). The protest group, known for hunger strikes, throwing mashed potato on paintings in museums or glueing themselves to the street, recently announced their aim to run for the European elections.
29/03/2024
N°21 – Set in Stone
Róisín is the president of the NUI Galway Feminist Society where she studies BCL law and human rights. Over the past few weeks, she campaigned in favour of an amendment of the 87-year-old Irish Constitution to get rid of the references to the role of “women within the home”. That proposal was rejected during a referendum on the 8th March, but Róisín has not changed her mind: the text should be updated.
25/03/2024
N°20 – Jupiter and the femminielli
Jupiter was born and raised in Naples. They have two Instagram profiles that coexist in the image of their two identities: that of Jupiter, a drag performer on the Neapolitan ballroom scene, and that of Antonio, the name on their identity card. They told us about the feminielli, people with fluid gender identities who have been present in Naples for centuries.
26/02/2024
N° 19 – No farmer, no future
Vivienne grew up on her family farm in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. She is now studying agricultural sciences to become a farmer like her grandfather, father, and brother. But she worries about the future for German farmers.
14/02/2024
N° 18 – Going home
Twelve years ago, Masha left Russia to study and then to work and live in various European countries. She shares her impressions with us, from her ten-day trip to Moscow, where she hadn’t set foot since the invasion of Ukraine.
31/01/2024
N°17 – Claiming the edge
Today, Ville proudly wears a cap bearing the words “straight edge”, but it took him a year before he publicly identified himself as such, for “fear of drinking again”. As this Finnish photographer and musician prepares a book on his journey from heavy drinking to a lifestyle free of ethanol, tobacco and meat, he reflects on his life before and after.
04/01/2024
N°15 – From one war to another (Part. II)
Bessan was born into a Palestinian family who took refuge in Syria, a country she in turn left because of her involvement in the Syrian revolution. She likes to say that she is Palestinian, because “it’s a source of pride, and a blessing, but also, in her heart, a source of sadness”. It’s a feeling and a struggle that she tries to explain to us, even if, she warns, “as we say in Arabic, ‘the hand that’s in the water is not the hand that’s in the fire’” – we can’t feel what she feels.
06/12/2023
N°14 – From one war to another
Daria, her husband and two of her children, left their home in Moscow after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, settled in Tel Aviv, Israel, and left her home there, too, after the Hamas attacks on October 7th. She explains what it feels like to flee and leave your home twice.
22/11/2023
N°14 – Almost European
Aulonë is the Senior Editor of Kosovo 2.0 magazine. She has a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Prishtina and a graduate certificate in women, gender, and sexuality studies from the University of Kansas, U.S. Aulonë wanted to tell us about her “strange” relationship with the EU.
15/11/2023
N°12 – In the house of the mafia
Eleonora grew up in Italy. She now lives in Fier and for the past year and a half has been working on the KeBuono project via the Engim association. In 2018, for the first time in Albania, the association was entrusted with the management of a property that had been confiscated from the mafia and which is now home to the social patisserie. The country now has two more.
11/10/2023
N°9 – Drag, glitter and politics
Belligerency is the stage name of Sergejs, an artist and co-founder of the drag & queer show Propaganda in Brussels. Belligerency is Latvian and Armenian, and with his co-founders Krasna and King Kovaci they seek to spotlight marginalised and erased queerness and give voice to the LGBTQIA+ community in Eastern & Southern Europe and West Asia. Their past shows included performances on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Armenian genocide, political repressions in the Soviet Union and revolutions.