IIn today’s Europe, millions of people live in transnational families. Whether due to work, study, migration, war, or family history, these families navigate everyday life across distance and time zones, maintaining ties that stretch far beyond borders. Although geographically dispersed families are not a new phenomenon, changing forms of mobility, communication, and transport have transformed how family members remain connected across distance.
Crossing Borders, Keeping Ties is a travelling and participatory exhibition that brings these stories to life. It invites visitors into the personal journeys of families living transnationally. Each poster tells a story in the voice of the family member themselves, accompanied by photographs, drawings, or meaningful objects. Thereby, the families offer a rare glimpse into the emotional landscapes of transnational life: the departures and reunions, the challenges and hopes, the care across generations, and the creativity of staying close while being far apart. It shows what it means to belong to more than one place, to keep traditions alive across distance, and to build home in movement.
Created collaboratively by families, artists, and researchers from the Transnational Family Dynamics in Europe (TraFaDy) network, the exhibition centres on the voices of those living these experiences, challenging stereotypes and expanding our understanding of what family can be in the 21st century. Across different generations and life stages, the stories show how relationships, identities, and feelings of (un)belonging are negotiated and transformed across geographical and social spaces. It is an invitation to listen, reflect, and connect. An accompanying booklet provides additional background information.
Using and presenting the exhibition
Crossing Borders, Keeping Ties has been conceived as a travelling and adaptable exhibition: it is designed not only to be displayed, but also to enter into dialogue with the places, institutions, and communities that host it. Its journey does not end when the posters arrive in a new country or institution. On the contrary, each new setting offers an opportunity to add perspectives, questions, objects, stories, and experiences that can enrich and extend the exhibition.
Hosting institutions are therefore invited to consider the exhibition not as a fixed and closed collection of materials, but as a flexible framework that can be interpreted and adapted according to their own context, audiences, resources, and possibilities. The exhibition can be presented as a side event, accompanying a conference, festival, academic meeting, or other programme, or it can become the main focus of a dedicated period of public programming. It may be displayed in museums, universities, libraries, community centres, cultural institutions, associations, local administrations, schools, or other public and accessible spaces. Its modular format allows institutions to determine how much material to display, how to organise the space, and which complementary activities may best engage their audiences.
As a participatory exhibition, it also invites hosts to complement the exhibition with local stories, testimonies, objects, or activities, and to involve local families, communities, associations, artists, or other stakeholders. In this way, the exhibition can continue to evolve as it travels, connecting the experiences gathered through TraFaDy with different local contexts. The complete exhibition can be downloaded free of charge. It has been designed for printing in DIN A0 format.
Coordination and contact
Heidi Rodrigues Martins
CDMH – Centre de Documentation Sur les Migrations Humaines
Rue Gare-Usines, L-3481 Dudelange, Luxembourg
martins.heidi@gmail.com
Authors
Theme 1. Redefining Family & Home
- Poster 1: Maintaining family ties across borders: a duty
- Antoinette Reuter, Centre de Documentation sur les Migrations Humaines, Luxembourg
- Poster 2: Family is more than who lives with you
- Anne Carolina Ramos, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
- Poster 3: “Macha, Macha!”: mapping the latitudes of transnational academic mobility and rituals of affection
- Rosalina Pisco Costa, & Interdisciplinary Center of Social Sciences (CICS.NOVA.UÉvora), Portugal
- Sofía Cumbajín Díaz, Universidade de Évora, Portugal
- Catarina Nunes, Universidade de Évora, Portugal
- Poster 4: “Home is where my family is”: from roots and routes
- Isabelle Albert, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
- Zoe da Costa, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Theme 2: The Trauma of Rupture & War
- Poster 5: The Colors of War: Nika Striletska’s divided family
- Petko Hristov, Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with Ethnographic Museum at Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria
- Poster 6: “Rights of Child: no exceptions, no borders”
- Demet Gülaldı, Üsküdar University, Istanbul, Türkiye
- Poster 7: Letters across borders: children’s stories of separation and reunion
- Eglantina Dervishi, University of Tirana, Albania
- Poster 8: I can be happy anywhere my family is
- Ute Karl, Protestant University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Theme 3: Emotional Bridges & Care
- Poster 9: Not a place, but a presence: four journeys home
- Lela Goginava, Grigol Robakidze University Tbilisi, Georgia
- Poster 10: “Matar saudades”: building affective bridges across distance
- Bárbara Bäckström, Universidade Aberta/LEAD, Portugal
- Poster 11: “If there would be no connection, there would be no life”
- Natalia Ringblom, Umeå university, Sweden
- Poster 12: Family is like a garden
- Esra Demirkol Colosio, Çankırı Karatekin University, Türkiye
Theme 4: Integration & New Beginnings
- Poster 13: “As a part of two different families”: marriage, kinship, and belonging
- Mariska Slekovec, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
- Poster 14: From European Union to Family Union
- Heidi Martins, Centre de Documentation sur les Migrations Humaines, Luxembourg
- Ana Maria de Carvalho Mafra Barreiro, Luxembourg/Portugal
Preview of the exhibtion
