Never Stop
In 2016 Carmelo Stompo met Arouna, a seventeen-year-old from Senegal who had crossed the desert, survived imprisonment in Libya, and reached Sicily by sea. Never Stop began as one crossing and became an encounter — not denunciation, but love: for a story that deserved attention, a young man who deserved respect, a way of photographing that does not judge. The images move through that geography: the dunes, the abstracted violence of Libya, a hand breaking the sea's surface, the wire and waiting rooms of arrival, a mosque courtyard, the greenhouses of Pachino where so many of Sicily's newest residents find their first work. Published as a book in 2018, it has travelled to exhibitions across Sicily and beyond. Ten years on, Arouna remains caught in a system that accuses him without proof, moved instead of released into detention centres in Trapani and Rome. Never Stop means not to stop believing in a fairer world, for Arouna and for everyone whose crossing is still in progress.
