Humade Crafts and Lesvos Solidarity.

  

Since 2015 Lesvos Island, Greece has been one of the central points of an unprecedented flow of population movement towards Europe. Especially after the EU-Turkey deal in March 2016, thousands of refugees and migrants were trapped on the island of Lesvos experiencing different forms of exclusion and inhumane living conditions.

The research for more and more substantial ways of supporting this population, together with the constant need to manage and exploit the massive amount of seemingly useless materials (life jackets, boats, plastic-glass bottles, etc.) piled on the coasts of the island, gave birth to the Lesvos Solidarity projects: Safe Passage Bags and Humade Crafts both of them housed in Mosaik Support Center in Mitilini, Lesvos.

The Safe Passage Bags workshop is therefore the legacy of the refugees to the society. Each bag carries with it the history of a forced travel, each bag will constitute in the future a solid historical proof of where violence can lead to, distributed among the people who care. Carrying a Safe Passage bag is therefore a reminder: "No one puts their child on a boat, unless the sea is safer than the land" (Warsan Shire).