Information on the Passengers photo exhibition

On 1 August 2016, the crew of the civilian sea rescue ship Iuventa rescued 118 people from an overcrowded and completely unseaworthy rubber boat off the Libyan coast.

Cesar Dezfuli photographed them. On board the Iuventa. Immediately after the rescue. The Spanish photographer asked every single one of the 118 people in front of the camera.

Giving each of the faces a name, a year of birth and a country of origin is an attempt to humanise the tragedy that continues to unfold in the Mediterranean. The faces of these people, their looks, the marks on their bodies, their clothes or lack thereof: They reflect the mood at that moment, which was a turning point in their lives.

They are people. Individuals. They are not simply part of a large, anonymous mass that is often defamed as threatening. They have – each of them has – their own story.

Cesar Dezfuli

Cesar Dezfuli was born in Madrid in 1991. Due to his Spanish-Iranian heritage, he grew up in a multicultural context.

In 2016, he accompanied the Iuventa on its first mission in the Mediterranean. Over the next few years, Cesar Dezfuli tried to find the rescued people in Europe. He found many of them again and visited them in their new places of residence, interviewed them and photographed them once more.

This resulted in the photo exhibition Passengers. The exhibition has been shown internationally at numerous locations. Cesar Dezfuli’s work has been honoured many times over: World Press Photo, Sony World Photography Awards, Journalist of the Year.

The Iuventa

The Iuventa is a converted fishing trawler. In 2016 and 2017, it was involved in the rescue of several thousand people in distress at sea in the Mediterranean. Ten crew members were put on trial in Italy. The proceedings ended in 2024 with acquittals.

The work of the Iuventa – and in passing the work of Cesar Dezfuli – is documented in the documentary film Iuventa by Michele Cinque.

The photo exhibition Passengers

After the exhibition had already been shown internationally and also in Germany, Jonas Buja – first officer and captain of the Iuventa in 2016 and 2017 – conceived the work of Cesar Dezfuli as a travelling and photographic exhibition for churches. It was then shown in December 2024 in a church in northern Hesse, which led a crew from Witzenhausen to contact Jonas Buja and Cesar Dezfuli to show the exhibition in a different format at festivals such as Fusion.

Contact: ak-passengers@systemli.org

cesardezfuli.com/passengers
united4rescue.org

English translation for the texts on the banners:

Migration, a historical phenomenon embedded in human nature, has in recent decades become one of the main centres of political and social debate in Western countries. A debate that focuses on the interests and needs of the receiving societies, while it criminalises the figure of the migrant, who, loaded with stereotypes and misinformation, is turned into a mass, stripped of all individuality, and therefore, of any possibility of comprehension.

Foto: 118 portraits

In the summer of 2016, César Dezfuli spends three weeks on board the Iuventa, a former fishing boat operated by the German NGO Jugend Rettet, where he witnesses the rescue vessel assist people risking their lives on the central Mediterranean migration route, the overseas crossing from Libya to Italy.

On August 1st, 118 people are rescued from a rubber dinghy drifting 20 nautical miles off the coast of Libya. Dezfuli photographs all the passengers on the boat minutes after their rescue, in an attempt to attach names and faces to this reality, to humanize this tragedy. Their faces, their looks, the marks on their body, their clothes or the absence of them, reflect the mood and physical state in which they were in a moment that had already marked their lives forever.

Shortly afterwards, they disembark in Italy, in the Sicilian port of Pozzalo.

Foto: Namen zu Gesichtern

But, who are they?

In 2016 alone, when all records for annual arrivals via the central Mediterranean route were broken, 181,436 people were brought to safety, while 4,576 lost their lives at sea. Thousands of individuals who would be systematically reduced to numbers.

The desire to document the reality of migration from a different perspective, to reclaim identities that remain invisible behind the statistics, leads photographer Cesar Dezfuli to a second stage:

The stories of the people rescued by the Iuventa crew on 1 August 2016 must be told. He sets out in search of the 118 passengers to find out why they left their countries, what they experienced on the migration route and how they continued their lives after being rescued at sea.

Neboth, born 1985 in Nigeria

When Neboth boards the rescue ship on 1 August 2016, there is no relief or joy on his face. He looks worried. Yes, he has reached Europe. But without his wife Joy, with whom he once left Nigeria.

He has a fickle character. Sometimes he is calm and rational, other times he is easily angered. His years of militancy in the liberation movement in Biafra, the separatist territory of Nigeria where he was born, probably soured his character. His fear of being killed led him to leave the country with his wife, also a fellow militant, beginning an erratic and aimless journey that took them through several countries before reaching Libya.

Neboth and his wife were separated in the Libyan city of Sabha, where they arrived from Niger after several days in the desert. Wherever he went in Libya he searched desperately for his wife, but never found her. And after six months of survival in a context of war, he finally set off across the sea alone, losing all hope of ever seeing Joy again.

But once in Italy, someone he met in Libya contacted him to tell him that his wife was alive. Joy survived the Mediterranean and, despite petitioning the authorities for reunification with her husband, was placed in a migrant women’s centre in Rome, hundreds of kilometres away from Neboth.

Amadou, born 1994 in Mali

“Once in the sea, I no longer feared death. I had suffered so much on the road, in Libya, that I reached a point where I didn’t even care about my own life,” says Amadou, while looking at the images of the moment in which he was rescued in the Mediterranean Sea.

But he already does it from a safe place. Almost six years have passed since he arrived in Europe, and finally his life begins to make its way in the city of Barcelona.

He moves as if he’s always been there, knows the subway map by heart. Amadou has been in Barcelona for more than 5 years, and has quickly integrated into the city. As if the two years he spent in Italy had increased the urgency he felt to live. There he lived in a migrant reception center located in a small town in Sicily, and the sporadic and poorly paid jobs that he sometimes found in agricultural greenhouses or on construction sites only allowed him to “free his spirit”, after his complex migratory journey, and send a little money to his mother, who remains in Mali.

In January 2022, Amadou obtained humanitarian protection, which means he will have a Spanish document and full rights for five years, renewable once that period has concluded. His life in Europe begins to take shape. Now he only dreams of being able to meet his mother again soon, whom he hasn’t seen for ten years.

Saidou, born 1992 in Guinea

Europe was never on Saidou’s goals when he left his country. Everything started with a phone call from his brother, who proposed to him to come and join him in Sabha, in the south of Libya, where he had been living for several years. Apparently, the salaries there were better and that could guarantee him savings with which to start a business in Guinea. He then began a migratory journey with no possibility of return. As soon as he entered Mali, his movements ceased to be autonomous and became controlled by the various human traffickers he had to pay on his way to Sabha. The entry into Libya was the final turning point. Libya is immersed in a war since 2011 and the territory is controlled by armed groups that sow insecurity and chaos in every corner of the country.

Saidou managed to reunite with his brother, but It did not take him long to realize that Libya was not a place to live. He worked in a bakery with his brother, but soon the situation became unsustainable. After two months, he began to look for ways to flee, and it is then that the migratory flow towards the coast, in the direction of Europe, swept him away.

Although Europe was not his initial objective, Saidou has found his place there. “Life has taught me to adapt quickly to every circumstance, to look for solutions even in the most difficult of contexts,” he says. After several years in Grottamare, Italy, where he obtained a residence permit and worked for a paragliding tourism company, at the end of 2019 he moved to Germany, where he has formed a family.