Marco Tiberio (b. 1988) is a creative director and photographic artist based in Amsterdam. His main field of interest is how human beings react to the changes in society and how they interact with it and the world they live in, being it physical or not. He likes to disorient and challenge serious topics in an ironic manner, turn them around and take the viewer in an unexpected journey where classic photography, video, print and generative photography merges together. His goal is to find new ways of investigating topics in order to make them more accessible to a broader public and give them new interpretations.
Netherlands –
KT: How did you get into photography?
MT: Both Maria and I have studied photography, so it was a bit of a successful event. She does art direction now, but she comes from Architecture and Design background, and I from International Relations studies, but we had the feelings that through images you can tell much more than through just words (e.g. academic papers, articles, etc.).
KT: You published a brilliant yet political book called ‘Immorefugee’ which sheds light on the refugee situation at a migrant camp in Calais, France also called as ‘The New Jungle.’ Why did you start photographing theme-shift tents of the migrant? When and how did you have your first encounter with the migrant situation?
MT: We already had some experience with the migrant situation in our town, Ravenna, because we both collaborated and worked with Caritas, but I had my first encounter with the migrant situation in Lampedusa, where a couple of years ago I worked on a documentary about the population of the island. Then, living in Brussels, I wanted to visit Calais to see what the situation was and I realized that there were already many journalists, photographers, etc. working there and often with the same perspective, namely the “breaking news/newspaper” one. This reason was why, together with Maria who is trained as an architect, we decided to turn the camera to something that is not usually shown, to try and give a different perspective.
KT: In one of your interviews, you have quoted that “I wanted to talk about migration in a different manner.” Can you please comment?
MT: Well, that is a bit related to the previous answer. Except for our work and the one from Henk Wildschut, we haven’t got a lot of perspectives from inside the camp. Most reports and projects were about the awful living conditions, children and the attempts to cross the Channel. I don’t want to be misunderstood, these reports and projects are critical, but they aren’t the only things that needs to be shown. This reason is why we wanted to show another feature of the camp. Also because visiting it quite often, that it wasn’t just a camp but a real city popped out from nowhere in the middle of Europe, where different ethnic groups cohabited. And then the real estate catalog had been the last twist we wanted to out to make the project stand out, even among the huge amount of documentary projects on migration.
