Bambini nel Deserto . 05/07/2024 . Reading time: 2 minutes
There are many false myths and prejudices spreading in our society regarding the phenomenon of migration. Some are more evident, others more subtle and difficult to identify. For these reasons, we wanted to create a real communication campaign: “The Truth Always Migrates Outside of Prejudice” is our way of identifying false truths and having the opportunity to discuss them together, with the aim of promoting greater awareness among everyone.
We believe that today’s content is useful for specifically addressing some errors of perception.
The first – macroscopic – concerns the difficulty many people have even imagining the path of atrocities, pain, and desolation that many people face to reach other nations. Thus, it happens that in common chatter, in a comment tossed out in a real or digital conversation, migration is minimized, made aseptic, downgraded to a phenomenon, and stripped of its human component, of the sometimes terrible and traumatic experiences, to become a number, a data point, a manipulable piece of information. On the contrary, as Bambini nel Deserto, we want to reaffirm that migrating is certainly not a cruise, and that behind each individual there can be an entire epic where hope often breaks into despair, and the dream in many cases turns into a nightmare.
The second prejudice about migration is perhaps less obvious: Western society tends to depict the migrant as male, and common perception tends to believe that there is only a modest percentage of female migrants. The data paints a very different picture: in 2020, women made up about 53 percent of foreign residents in Italy. For many years, we have indeed been witnessing a clear increase in female migrants, who in some cases risk facing two disadvantages: being foreigners and being women. This is why today’s protagonists are Afya and Mara: as the title of this communication project suggests, they exist only in an image created with Artificial Intelligence; but we hope they help all of us awaken our intelligence; including the emotional one.