Theme: POROUS BORDERS

Since the beginning of time, humanity has always been “in motion”. Some people move searching for new horizons, others to escape conflict, poverty, hunger, persecution or the effects of climate change, but for many, it is often a complex multitude of such factors driving their movement. Nowadays we are facing one of the greatest human flows in history. According to the United Nations reports, wars and economic crisis push 33,000 people daily to move from their countries of origin in search of peace and fundamental human rights. Women, men and children die every day on the long journey to salvation in an attempt to cross seas and borders; the physical, political and cultural barriers before them.

Faced with this situation, the TEDx Community feels the need to contribute to the international discussion around such an urgent issue, which has both local and global consequences. For the first time ever then, six Team Organisers of TEDx events, from different cities in Europe, have decided to tackle this topic together in a single format, departing from different geographical and cultural perspectives.

The project, based on the Relay Race Format, consists of a series of TEDx Salon events organised in Europe, which over the course of one day, will connect and communicate these perspectives via a live streaming platform, sharing the speakers’ humanitarian perspectives.
Through six local events – TEDxCesena, TEDxGenova, TEDxReggioEmilia, TEDxRoma, TEDxMünchen and TEDxLeicester – Italy, England and Germany will discuss a theme around refugees called “Porous Borders”: a concept that goes far beyond understanding borders, as many currently do, to simply be spaces of linear geometry, but rather wanting to take on a redefinition: one of porosity as complexity.

And yet, what is a border? Is it a thing that protects us or divides us?
Does it pose risk or opportunity?

On this day we invite the speakers and our communities to explore this theme from different points of view, offering a neutral dimension to discuss a global and complex topic in a transversal and innovative way.

ANEMOS - EX MAFFIA
33 Via Ramazzini
Reggio Emilia, Emilia-Romagna, 42124
Italy

Zakaria Mohamed Ali

documentary filmmaker

Zakaria Mohamed Ali is a documentary filmmaker. He worked as a freelancer in Somalia during the civil war. For his work he risked his life several times, and in Mogadishu I lost his friends and colleagues. He went to Hargeisa Somaliland, where his escape begins, the journey to search for a better future (looking for sense), it was 2 December 2007 when he left his country. He arrived in Italy via Lampedusa in August 2008. In 2011 he participated in the video-training project promoted by Archivio delle Memorie Migranti (AMM -archive of migrants memories) and he shot one of the episodes of the film “Benvenuti in Italia – Welcome to Italy”: “Dadir”. In 2012 he shot the short film “To whom it may concern”, a short documentary that tells about his return to Lampedusa, by reading his diary. An opportunity to recall the stay in the CIE and go in search of lost memories. The documentary was selected by the “House of European History Exhibit” of the European Parliament in Brussels.