Activities in the park: Berlin, London, Milan, Paris

For some time now, public parks in European cities have been widely used by the immigrant population. This phenomenon, which began a number of years ago in major cities in France and Germany – and is more recent in Italian cities – can be attributed to a lack of private places where these people can meet.
During public holidays, the park grounds are the setting for a wide range of social practices that are of interest to foreigners: games, an essential element for meeting and exercising potential freedom; eating together; traditional music and dancing. Experiencing the park also becomes the search for nature that seldom exists in the lives of immigrants in the city.
The different ways of occupying the park trigger problems concerning domestic customs, proximity and distance, foreigners and the public and private sphere. In this respect, the grassy areas become containers of differences, and provide the opportunity to develop a different feeling of tolerance and a different ability to co-exist.
This research documents the phenomenon through experiential fragments that contain unexpected elements within them: filming upwards and in a horizontal format makes the perception of the space discontinuous; “out-of-frame” shots, or, a deliberately non-central, non-narrative aspect, predominate. Like a “fluttering of the eyelids”, and a perception without centrality.