VII Interactive: Book Club. “TRANSIT” – A Seven-year-long Book Project with Espen Rasmussen
Espen Rasmussen writes: ”In 2012 with Dewi Lewis Publishing, I published my book Transit, a seven-year-long journey around the world, documenting the lives of refugees and displaced people. I traveled to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, to Syria and Yemen. I met people escaping violence and war in Colombia, Serbia, The Democratic Republic of Congo, and Chad. And I followed Rahman, a young boy living in Norway as an undocumented immigrant with no papers, for a period of two years. The book is about survival: how human beings are able to adapt and cope in surroundings that for most of us are impossible to live in. I spent most of the time talking to people, interviewing them, and documenting their everyday life as refugees and displaced people. In this edition of VII Interactive Book Club, I take you through the process of documenting refugees and displaced people around the world. I discuss how this project started as a single story, developed into a long-term project, and ended up as a book. I also talk about the editing process of the Transit book and the work leading up to a major exhibition at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Norway.” Espen is still working on Transit, continuing to document refugees and displaced people.
This lecture was originally hosted at VII Interactive, a new resource for sharing insights and information on the craft of visual storytelling. We are building different platforms within the VII ecosystem, where the public can engage directly, online with a live instructor. VII Interactive offers programming that is free and available to everyone, in addition to paid classes and individual mentoring that can be fashioned to your needs.