Our friends Icy & Sot recently traveled to the Greek island of Lesbos to produce some new work in hopes of raising awareness about the deteriorating conditions in the EU-sponsored Moria refugee camp. The Iranian brothers teamed up with a member of Juxtapoz' extended family, Doug Gillen from Fifth Wall, to document their project and we're proud to share the result of their efforts.

As immigrants themselves, Icy & Sot have been working with refugees and human rights for a long time now. Continuously interested in trying new channels of conveying their ideas, they go beyond building site-specific interventions to create something useful for the people living there. With the help of locals, they've built vegetable and herb gardens, as well as flowers for the inhabitants to beautify their "homes" and hopefully connect through taking care of them. "We came up with the idea of giving flowers and making a vegetable garden because, in the end, they get something from the garden and flowers make everyone happy."

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Back in January 2019, the British-based NGO Oxfam described the increasingly dangerous conditions in the EU-sponsored camp, where nearly 5,000 people are stranded on their journey to a better life. Asylum seekers, mostly from war-torn countries like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, are living in flimsy tents and cramped containers, with an insufficient number of toilets and showers, which are also poorly maintained, risking exposure to fecal matter and other health concerns. After a landmark agreement between the EU and Turkey in March 2016, which aimed to reduce the number of people arriving into the continent, asylum seekers in “hotspot” camps on the Greek islands were forbidden from leaving to travel to the mainland, resulting in over 15,000 men, women and children being stuck in Lesbos and other islands closest to Turkey.

Aside from the main gardening project, a sculptural piece of discarded life vests was installed on the mountain while a series of photographs and small video pieces depict the life of people in the camp. Stuck in Time is a metaphor for the non-existence of time for people whose future is uncertain and taken out of their hands, while Lost Voices are silent films that symbolize the voicelessness of the asylum seekers. "It was wonderful to see that actually put a smile on peoples faces for a moment, but we know this project didn't really change anything for those people," the artists admitted. ––Sasha Bogojev

We also had a conversation with Icy & Sot about their experiences growing up in Iran, moving to New York, and crafting their creative process. Check it out here.