 Hello, we are Sam Kirsten and Kata from Dragon Dance Theatre. We are living and working artists, and furthermore we are artists as witnesses. This is a project that we initiated under Dragon Dance Theatre. We were concerned about what was going on related to the migrant and refugee crisis in the world. We felt like as artists it was important for us to go and see and witness what was going on out there. Our objective this time was to go on the island of Lesvos in Greece where in 2015 almost 800,000 refugees and migrants arrived. They were mostly coming from the Middle East and some of them are from Africa. As soon as we arrived in Athens, flying direct Montreal to Athens, we realized that there was a big community of refugees living on Pier 1 at the port in Piraeus. We made our way down there on foot and were taken completely by the amazing contrast since Piraeus is one of the most important tourist ports in Europe. These very gorgeous luxury liners loaded with the richest of tourists were passing by Pier 1 where there were 3,000 refugees living in little pop-up tents with very little water and very little sanitation and very little food and they were in a desperate situation there. And we went on one of those ships to the island of Lesvos. We made arrangements to go and stay for 2 months and we picked an area where the boats land. And so we first started by meeting with some local volunteers and we spent a week sort of helping out with one of their projects. Through them we were able to go to the refugee camps and propose some of our projects which was to make mask making projects inside the refugee camps. Well, we also became involved with the Scala Sicamania, which was a fisherman's village along the north coast of Lesvos, which had a tradition of receiving refugees and had the experience because of the fishing boats going out into the straits of Mittalini where the refugee rafts were crossing from Turkey of encountering the refugees at sea and having to rescue them. So usually this was one or two men on a not very large fishing boat who went out to sea to fish but then encountered a raft that was in distress with perhaps 30 people aboard or 16 people aboard who really required a rescue. They were having to deal with drowned people and with lost people and with homeless people and with destitute people and people who were really in great distress. We had planned a collaboration with the University of Thessaloniki, the arts department there. So after two months that we had been giving workshops, speaking with local people, integrating our life with them. Every night of those days we were also sketching. Sam was sketching, making images of what we were going through, what we were being told, the stories that the refugees told us. The refugees must cross into Greece in these rubber rafts even though there is a perfectly good transportation system that provides daily transportation to and from Turkey for any number of people at a very reasonable price of 10 euros. These refugees having to deal with the criminal element or with mafiosos are paying 700 maybe 1000 euros for a seat in this very risky raft which is crossing the same body of water with people running. The operator of the raft has no idea where he's going even, has never been at sea before, knows nothing about ships or about his raft or how to save the people he's with or even where he's going. So in this picture we try and depict that strange conflict between the reality for the tourist and the reality for the refugee. So this exhibit that's here at City Center, starting now in the middle of May, early May until the first week of June, is a collection of 20 images of what we lived and what we experienced during those two months. Our project for this year we hope, it's currently in development, is that we would like to go on one of the search and rescue ships that are in the Mediterranean in the south of Italy and these are boats that are coming from Libya. So it's a much, even much more dangerous journey. There are a lot of people who are drowning. There were weekly drownings where we were on Lesvos as well when they were crossing from Turkey. So that's the next phase of the project, which will happen September, October 2017. Our project was called Artist as Witness and we did witness and we made these pictures as testimonies. I'd refer to another picture, the Virgin of Sycamania. The interesting thing here, and I think why the Virgin has become a folkloric figure here, is because this is the right place to cross. In order to get from the Middle East or from Africa into Europe, the safest place to cross is the Straits of Mittellini. And in a sense, the refugees find when they do succeed and they are often in desperate Straits out there, the weather is awful and the sea can be rough and there's something that saves them. And we imagine that to be the Virgin of Sycamania. And perhaps it is, but also perhaps that Virgin is manifested in the whole physical situation and the whole physical situation of the Mediterranean as well. And it is possible to cross here. And people have come here for centuries to cross from the Middle East into Europe. And I think that's why we see so much history in these tiny pictures.