Hear no more. See no more. Say. No. More.
On a long grey side street in Lausanne, colourful displays, lettering from elsewhere, far, and men and women modelling the hairstyles offered inside, caught my wandering eyes.
Not one, two, but even three shops down in a row. I got to the barbershop street, it seems, and so I entered.
Between the snipping scissors, metal clippers combing through the kinks, and steaming football debates making their way through the sound of the loud hair dryer, I felt a sense of isolation, calm and culture that few (if any) places in this town can match.
Fragments of identity spread across the tools, and new music was discovered on the old stereo in the corner.
'Is that Arabic music I hear?' I asked. 'In this street, you will listen to all types of music, just not from here.'
An identity was chopped and created in these trims. Overgrown beards and long-faded shapes, young and old, crowded the shops throughout the day and left reborn anew.
Cut from the past, it is this regular fixture, the beauty in the noise, that counts.
This is a story of belonging and marginalisation.
Finding connection and fostering community in an everyday space, where we live and do things that stand out as tangible, as a way of being, of looking, and yet are only layers of our intangible collective consciousness.
On their journey through the desert and across the Mediterranean, stories are always here.
Will we hear, see and tell their stories, and try to bridge a connection to what we once called home?
