Notes from a world of slaves. CROSSINGS by Arko Datto

CROSSINGS series was created with the help of Google Maps and Google Earth, wherein the images were taken. Arko Datto shows the society that the migrant diaspora has helped to build, shape and maintain while occupying the bottom echelons of society.

The narrative is woven around quotations found in Academic Reports and Journalistic Articles on the existing state of affairs in Arabia. The quotations primarily deal with individual experiences of human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia, but also include the Emiratis and the Western expatriate population.

I have been made to work without any money for months. Now, for a moth I’ve been suffering from a constant headache and wanted to visit a doctor to examine my condition. I asked my camp boss for $14 but he refused and told me to get back to work… After my death I want the company to pay all my salary dues to my family and repay the financial debt my family has incurred because of them.

Arumugam Venketesan, 24, in his suicide note, “Worker borrowed to by stamp for suicide letter,” Construction Week, No. 83, August 6-19, 2005.

Crossings

Modern civilisation in Arabia was built with the sweat and grime of countless unremembered migrants.They travelled from the southern climes of the Indian subcontinent and south-East Asia, lured by dreams of better lives for themselves and those they left behind, fellowmen from familiar lands, all setting forth westwards like me, towards their unknown destinies. Tricked by agents back home and cheated by the law of the land: lives lived on meagre food in unsanitary cramped quarters, women raped and locked away in dingy rooms, men dead from exhaustion or dehydration or both, lives where basic human rights are stripped away to their very core. Most of those that create, burning under the sweltering heat, do not get to see their beautiful creations. This story is a tribute to them, to those that toil under a merciless sun, so that Arabia might live.