The Project

Presentation

The exhibition Infância Refugiada / Refugee Childhood – Palestinians in Turkey, Lebanon and Syria, is a solo exhibition by Brazilian photographer Karine Garcêz, which captures the expressions of Palestinian children and adolescents who live in refugee camps distributed in Turkey, Lebanon and Syria. The pictures were taken in 2014, during the humanitarian trip Karine Garcêz took integrating the mission from the Dutch NGO Al Wafaa Campaign. The name of the NGO means “Fulfilling the Campaign” and it dedicates exclusively to the Palestinian cause.

The exhibition’s goal is to register childhood in refugee camps and raise awareness about the responsibility the international community has towards the harsh reality of war and absence of basic social rights, conditions which these children are under. Infância Refugiada / Refugee Childhood will tour initially through Brasília, Fortaleza, São Paulo and Curitiba in Brazil, and Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

Giving visibility to innocent victims of wars.

Rationale

Karine Garcêz is a Brazilian photographer from Ceará who converted to Islam around 10 years ago. She has been doing this solo work about the preserved innocence by the children, even when facing a degrading human situation. The refugee Palestinian children are little adults, who keep all childish delicacy at the same time that they already have political awareness.

According to the United Nations Organization (UN), today there are more than 50 million refugees, people who due to wars and persecutions, were obliged to flee their homes. Around 5 million are Palestinians victims of the conflict started in1948. Around a third of those Palestinian refugees live in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and in Gaziantep, a Turkish city located near the Syrian border. It is estimated that around 80 thousand Palestinian children and adolescents are refugees in Gaziantep.

Victims of war, the children have their rights violated by violence, tearing the pages of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child from 1959 and the Convention on the Rights of the Child from 1989. The war takes their homes,communities, privacy, dignity, innocence and many times their lives. The survivor carries the consequences of the experience of this stage of life: anxiety, depression and aggressiveness.

Even if they are not regarded as children, they are still children and that is how we should look at them. Not going back to the past and seeing them as grown-ups but defending their rights to be children. They are little seeds that have to be watered, not mature trees which we already expect fruits and shadow from. The child’s age is not the same as the war age. It is the love age.

The exhibition Infância Refugiada/ Refugee Childhood is a window which intends to tour throughout the world making the foreign sight reach out to the Palestinian childhood, today refuging and threatened, in the expectation that all the hope that is in the look of these little rightful citizens to be fed by world citizens.

The hope and the sight are two territories which should not find barriers.

Objectives

The objective of the exhibition is to register childhood in refugee camps and generate reflection on the responsibility the international community has towards the harsh reality of war and absence of basic social rights, condition which these children are submitted to.

Social counterpart/compensation

The souvenir sales of the exhibition go to the NGO Al Wafaa Campaign , which performs humanitarian intervention with Palestinian refugees.

Who is Al Wafaa Campaign?