Seaview

In the postwar period, exactly 60 years ago, the seaside holiday camp Mosney was founded in Ireland to give families a temporary refuge from their everyday life. Today the place is used for another kind of place of refuge: as a home for asylum seekers, most of whom remain there for several years. “Passages are houses or walkways that have no outside – like a dream.” says Walter Benjamin in the “Passagenwerk”. Inside the low grey buildings is a completely equipped world of entertainment. The camera wanders dreamily through the abandoned dance hall, an empty swimming pool, through dining halls, children’s play areas, along the slot machines, colorful plastic decorations, neon signs touting fish & chips. Each time before it once again stops in front of a door marked “Push Bar to Open,” other spaces open up: mattrasses and bedding stacked up to the ceiling, second hand shopping clothes and shopping turn the dream into a nightmare, without transition and in unchanged pastel tones. “The new business,” is how one employee refers to the change from tourism to directing a refugee camp with a seaview. At least the children have the possibility of getting education and a creative shape to their everyday life. But the stories of their parents, who came from Nigeria, Somalia, Russian, or Croatia with quite different expectations, thwart the smooth pans again and again.
Stefanie Schulte Strathaus