Carina Riedl and Dieter Kovačič plan to walk roughly 2500 kilometres from Vienna to Istanbul and read the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Initiators Carina Riedl and Dieter Kovačič plan to walk roughly 2500 kilometres from Vienna to Istanbul and read the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And we would like you to join us: by walking with us, hosting us, o
r by reading along and thus raising your voice for an open Europe; through letters or posts of all kinds, on the trail or on the web. INTO THE CRACKS crosses borders. Over 99 days, from September 3rd to December 10th, 2022 – International Human Rights Day, celebrating the 74th anniversary of the United Nations’ proclamation of the UDHR – we will walk a path which, in its opposite direction, has become known as the Balkan route. It will take us to ten different countries – Austria, Slovenia, Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Turkey – and to territories where political tensions have caused violence, war, and deep cracks. These regions have seen migration movements for centuries, and the Balkans remain among the hot spots of European migration policy to date. Our project is in many respects a borderline experience: geographically, personally, and physically. Multiple times we will leave the EU’s external borders, asking ourselves: What does it mean to be Fortress Europe? How does this affect us? How do we respond to ongoing, systematic human rights violations against refugees, to illegal pushbacks, reports of torture, rape, and methodical violence in detention centres just outside Europe’s thresholds? INTO THE CRACKS seeks the encounter. We will record the entire trail using two GoPro cameras: one facing backwards, the other ahead. Also, we will portray some of the people we encounter – those who kindly agreed to host us as well as strangers we happen to meet on the way. Each day, we will invite one of them to join us in reading an article of the Human Rights Declaration. This way, we hope to call back this text to our memories, to give it time and space, to listen to it, to relate to it. All material will be accessible via our website, with daily updates. INTO THE CRACKS is participatory. This transnational project deals with issues such as migration, leaving, and freedom of movement, tackling the very nature of borders. Convinced that borders are intrinsically permeable, genuine places of exchange and encounter, we will cross national, language, and genre barriers, but also blur the lines between the hyper-concrete situation of walking a physical trail and its virtual counterpart of following it in the digital realm. As the separation between those who act and those who receive becomes fluent, we want to create space for dialogue and action, open to all: physically and digitally, on the road, and in our website’s virtual common area. Each and every fellow traveller, host, and guest is invited to shape and contribute to the project – and thus be part of INTO THE CRACKS.
