Rotterdam, Netherlands – A brilliant snail staircase protruding from the roof of an old Dutch warehouse gives the river route where millions of Europeans once boarded ships bound for a new life in the United States.
The Retiro Route, aimed at representing the unexpected trips of migrants, is located in the Fenix Museum, the new attraction on the coast of Rotterdam.
The museum tells the history of migration, with exhibitions that include thousands of traveler suitcases, refugee portraits and a real -size municipal bus.
The architect Ma Yansong of the Chinese firm Mad Architects told Associated Press that he wanted the building to serve not only as a museum but also as “a memory.”
The Museum opens on Friday when migration is increasing, along with anti -immigrant feeling in many parts of the world. The number of people living outside their country of birth, more than 300 million, has almost doubled since 1990, according to the United Nations.
“As long as we exist as human beings, we move and migrate. And we will always continue doing that. And that is what we show in Fenix,” said Museum’s director Anne Kremers.
As the construction of the museum continued last year, The Dutch Hard Government announced unprecedented measures Aimed at migration, including a reintroduction of border controls. He broke a long image of the Netherlands as a nation that welcomed newcomers.
The Mira museum visualization platform through Rotterdam, whose 650,000 inhabitants represent more than 170 nationalities. The city is the largest port in Europe.
Many of those who leave Rotterdam in the first part of the twentieth century made the transatlantic trip on the Holland America line, a shipping company founded by the Van Der Vorm family in 1873. The family has been the main financial sponsor of the Fenix project, through the Dutch Art Foundation Droom in Daad (Dream and Action).
Art can sometimes provide a better basis for the discussion of politically charged issues such as migration, said Cathrine Bublatzky, an anthropologist who studies the intersection of art and migration.
Kremers said he expects visitors to take off “what he feels like abandoning his home, finding a new home and saying goodbye.”
