“Check-in” to an alternative visual destination: Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and Athens International Airport invite the visitors to «a trip into the margins of contemporary cities» at the airport.

From May 13 to August 30 2013, the new exhibition hosted by the Athens International Airport  presents heartbreaking images of high artistic value that famous photographers from Noor/Apeiron agency -Stanley Greene, Francesco Zizola, Pep Bonet, Alixandra Fazzina και Jon Lowenstein-captured while travelling with Doctors Without Borders in the slums of Dhaka, Karachi, Nairobi, Johannesburg and Port au Prince. The photo exhibition and a twin video screening  taking us also to Guatemala City’s  and Tegucigalpa’s slums, reveal urban survivors’ daily lives, the issues they face and MSF’s work in these contexts. Currently, MSF intervenes with projects in urban areas in more than 20 locations around the world, among others providing healthcare to malnourished children in Dhaka, victims of sexual violence in Port-au-Prince, and vulnerable migrants in Johannesburg.

“Urban Survivors” that has already been successfully presented in Belgium, Italy, Hong Kong and other cities around the world, is curated by Doctors Without Borders in collaboration with Athens International Airport “Eleftherios Venizelos,” with the support of Noor/Apeiron agency,  the Documentary Festival of Thessaloniki and the voluntary assistance of the Photographic Group Pragma.

From May 13 to August 30 2013, at the “Environment & Culture” space at the departures level (entrance 3/open 24 hour).

Striving to survive in the “slums”

Today, more than 800 million people - one out of ten people on the planet - live in slum conditions. A slum, as defined by the United Nations agency UN–HABITAT, is a run-down area in a city characterized by the lack of one or more of the following five features: durable housing, sufficient living space, access to safe drinking water, access to sanitation and secure tenure. In Dhaka, Karachi, Nairobi, Johannesburg and Port au Prince, the overcrowding, the inadequate health structures and the rise of infectious diseases have devastating consequences, particularly for the most vulnerable populations such as women, the elderly, children and undocumented migrants.

Urban survivors, people who live in the margins of contemporary cities, give us their personal narrative on their context. It’s about people who struggle to survive in an unrelenting urbanized environment, deprived of essential goods, but having surplus power and a brave stand against social exclusion they experience. Through these pictures that depict their daily lives, they invite us to reflect on some phenomena that even if they don’t have reached yet our own cities with the same intensity, they are sounding a loud alarm. Koursent, 38, from Dhaka, is one of them. “People here are struggling for life’s basic necessities. They earn so little that even a second change of clothes is a huge struggle. They battle daily to find medicines, food supplies, or healthcare options when their children or themselves get sick,” he says.

Through this extraordinary visual approach, MSF invites us to show the same braveness and to not turn our backs to the Urban Survivors and to the issue of social exclusion. We should recognise it, try to understand and deal with it.

For more information, please visit: www.urbansurvivors.org

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Images for media use available to download:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/9v5dg6zp9su20x8/Urban_Survivors_exhibition_Noor_photos.zip

For more information, please visit:
http://noorimages.com/project/urban--survivors--into--the--slums--a--group--project--by--noor/
www.urbansurvivors.org

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