More than one million immigrants from Africa reside in Italy. These are merely official numbers—a vast number of undocumented migrants also add to this figure. The forces at play behind the choice to make a life-threatening journey across the sea are as diverse as the individuals behind the statistic. In her project Nowhere Near, Alisa Martynova spent time by the coasts of Italy, and later France, photographing people who have made the perilous crossing, united by the shared experience of migration yet each carrying with them their own story; their own hopes, fears, dreams and disappointments.
The collection of portraits the photographer emerged with, which she refers to as a “constellation” of different people from different places, puts individual stories in the spotlight, each picture accompanied by a short text. And for Martynova, shining a light on each person she met while working on Nowhere Near is as much a visual choice as it is a metaphorical one.
Foregoing documentary for a more lyrical approach that tries to make visible a relationship between people and the landscape, but also between interior lives and exterior reality, the project unfolds against the backdrop of an enigmatic, nocturnal terrain of conflicting energies played out in tones of red and blue. Mainly taken under the cover of night, when most of these long and grueling journeys took place, the landscape is eerie and sharp and the people in it etched by light.
Through Martynova’s lens, a liminal space is constructed with enough room for the dreams, nightmares, hope and disillusionment of the people she photographed to coexist. Describing the people in her images as “stars,” they are often pictured navigating through an uncertain, moon-like land illuminated sparsely by the flash of her camera.
Interested in translating reality into a symbolic parallel world—one where emotion and memory are projected onto the surroundings often through the use of bursts of colored light—Martynova’s work has often drawn out our complicated relationship to the landscape we move through. In High Fire in the Forest’s Heart, she brought to life the long-dormant stories of Russians who fled the Bolshevik regime to Italy (her adopted home, having left Russia herself to study photography in Florence over a decade ago) after the 1917 revolution. In search of traces of this history, she questioned what we leave behind, what we bring with us and what marks of Russia remain in the Italian landscape or in the descendents who live on.
Made over four years, Nowhere Near focuses on a story belonging to our time—or rather a constellation of stories. Countering populist rhetoric on the issue of migration and static representations of those affected by it, Martynova wanted to draw attention to the many reasons one might choose to leave their homeland.
A study by the International Organization of Migrants, carried out in 2016, pointed to insecurity, conflict, and discrimination as the main drivers of migration, rather than solely economic and work reasons. Discrimination on the basis of social group, religion, or sexual orientation was mentioned by almost half of the study group. The people the photographer met in Florence, and later Normandy where she continued the project, come from Nigeria, The Gambia, the Ivory Coast, Rwanda, Congo, Senegal, Mali, Sierra Leone, Guinea and across Europe, and all chose to leave for different reasons.
Some arrived 10 years ago, some more recently. Some, who were bound for Libya, experienced their dream turn into a nightmare, ending up in Libyan prison. Others fled political persecution. Some were ready to leave elements of their identity behind on arrival. Others hold onto their traditions tightly, like Marie who came to Normandy from Rwanda via England and has written two books on her native culture, or Clayton, a young Cameroonian student who is setting up a school in Italy to teach traditional dance. Some wish to return home, like Dora; a young student from Gabon currently studying design in Italy who wants to move back after graduating, photographed in the intimacy of a bedroom, a sliver of light illuminating her face.
In one of the most striking photographs, a woman is pictured blurred in motion, standing atop a rock against a frothing nighttime sea. During their meeting, Blessing, who is originally from Nigeria and now lives and works in Livorno, Italy, told Martynova of her vivid, colorful dreams. These dreams, and the many others she collected in her encounters with the people she met, seep into her photographs of the landscape. The coast is erratic and ominous, its sea and jagged rocks rendered in deep red and cold blues, the images tinged by the personal experiences of the people in them. Nowhere Near presents a constellation of just some of the individual stories that make up the millions of migrants who embarked on a treacherous and uncertain journey into the unknown.
