Get them Out of Sight
The displacement of minority and socially excluded communities by local authorities is a phenomenon that is also very familiar and typical in the Czech Republic. Very local cases often have a short media lifespan, if they generate any appropriate interest at all. People and communities become anonymous groups of “misfits” and individual displacements merge to become a loose collection of cases set adrift in space and time. In Serbia, the Bankwatch organisation used modern media to focus on an investment plan sponsored by the World Bank. It put the game of chess that was being played with inconvenient communities onto a virtual map and substantiated it with the specific stories of people affected by transfers to areas beyond the reach of basic services. People who could only have drawn attention to their plight with great difficulty in the past now have with an unprecedented opportunity to be seen and heard thanks to visual representations supported by video testimonies. It gives those who aren’t indifferent to the fate of these communities an opportunity to monitor the situation and obtain a better overview of what’s happening. The Out of Sight project is an inspirational concept, which could point to previously unseen trends and contexts if it were extended geographically and implemented over a longer period of time.
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