Off-piste in Italy

As announced, the truck is now back in action. Our Telegram subscribers are already familiar with them: the Off-Pisté Collective has been using the truck around Ventimiglia on the French-Italian border for their support work in the region since the end of February. The possibilities of the mobile infrastructure are fully used: generating solar power, charging mobile devices with the charging station and cooking hot meals. In addition, the collective was able to bring back many donations from Berlin, for example in the form of rainproof clothing and first aid equipment. Many thanks to everyone who gave their helping hand!

Since 2015 during the start of the european border crisis, ventimiglia as a bordercity has been a place of transit but also a point where people get pushbacked to. Pushbacks are violent and oftentimes illegal and th epeople that are bordered into this territory face harsh conditions, police brutality and racist hostility.

The pushbacks happen both locally but also from further points in central Europe. The people getting pushbacked are facing inhumane treatment. In Ventimiglia they get boxed into a container box jail at the border of the city and are usually made to be there for hours and in worst case days without sufficient warmth or nourishment or space. After incarceration people are not given maps or directions and are just released somewhere in the middle of a mountain road far from the cities.

In the city of Ventimiglia there is also a makeshift self-iniated camp for people on the move who either are continuously pushbacked or seeking asylum. Despite the fact that the state should offer accomodation to people in the asylum procedure, it often does not for many many many months and people are left to the very hostile conditions of living on the streets, and are not only subject to homelessness but also police persecution and the criminalization of homelessness and paperlessness. Here refugees are often not legally allowed to work and so are subject to financial poverty or instability, without stable access to physical or mental health services and facing unnerving concerns and uncertainity about the future of their lifes which is being determined by their legal status, which is decided by the same border complex who violates their basic right to life.

Off-pisté collective seeks to act in solidarity and mutual aid with the people who experience bordered repression. This border has damaged many lives. It has killed and continues to kill. The border is a violation of safety, dignity and human rights.