On the occasion of the fifth edition of the Biennale Democrazia (Democracy Biennale), the Fondazione Merz will participate in and host an exhibition that reflects on one of the crises of our time, in a search for the necessary answers, new directions to explore and new possibilities. The 2017 Biennale will be dedicated to one of the most evoked words in contemporary political language: emergency. Its uses and its abuses. What this term hides and what it makes manifest.

What do the thousands of people who risk their lives trying to reach Europe offer us? In addition to their lives and their work, narratives and images too, which, added to our own can build new European memories.
The exhibition documents this process with interviews, films, drawings and photographs, collected in Italy and the Netherlands by the research project “Bodies Across Borders: Oral and Visual Memory in Europe and Beyond”, sponsored by the European Research Council at the Istituto Universitario Europeo in Florence, and directed by Luisa Passerini.

The exhibition, with a layout designed by Melina Mulas and the exhibition coordination of Luisa Passerini, will be inaugurated on 29 March as part of the Democracy Biennale events and will end on 30 April.