The Instituto Cervantes Manchester presents the book EUROPA? A collaboration between Ignacio Evangelista, a Spanish photographer, and the British writer Chris Burkham; combining photography and fiction to examine the experiences of modern European migrants.

Ignacio Evangelista’s haunting photographic series ‘After Schengen’ shows abandoned and disused European border crossings following 1985’s Schengen Agreement. Writer Chris Burkham saw these photos in the UK’s Independent on Sunday newspaper, and the result is EUROPA?; a hybrid collection of images and fiction.Burkham’s short stories ask who makes these journeys after-Schengen and peoples Evangelista’s images with characters and their narratives that explore possibility, fear, hope and unease; playing on the notion of perpetual flux that is a central part of the European experiment. Avoiding the prevalent accounts of refugees escaping war zones; instead the book focuses on the peripheral, the migrants who continually criss-cross these arbitrary lines on the map.

About the authors
Chris Burkham writes short fiction and was previously a freelance feature journalist. He wrote, and edited a post-Punk fanzine in the late 1970s, and wrote about culture and music for Sounds, and The Face in the 1980s. He interviewed Yasser Arafat and the PLO leadership in Tunis for New Society in 1984 and covered the events of the UK Miners’ Strike in 1984 for The New Statesman, which he revisited in 2004 for The Observer Magazine. He also wrote travel and fashion articles for the Financial Times, about a Shakespearean drama group in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro for the Sunday Telegraph Magazine, as well as contributing to The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Spectator, Private Eye and Vanity Fair.
Ignacio Evangelista is a Spanish photographer born in Valencia. His photographic work examines the sometimes-contradictory relationship between the natural and the artificial. He focuses on places and situations where things do not seem to be in the right place, or at the right time, both physically and temporally. The ‘After Schengen’ series has been exhibited in the USA, Germany, France, Switzerland, Netherlands, Canada, Hungary, and Spain, and have been featured on CNN TV, ARTE TV, The Independent on Sunday, Citylab/The Atlantic, L’Oeil de la Photographie, Der Spiegel, VICE, Forbes, The European, Haaretz, ArchDaily, Domus Magazine, POLKA Magazine and La Repubblica, among others.