News

Opening of the Open Your Eyes Exhibit

Published on
September 15, 2017

The opening of the photography exhibit “Open your eyes” will take place on Thursday 21 September at Impulse on Wageningen Campus. From that date, there will be thirty large, unsettling portraits displaying victims of human trafficking on the Square near Forum and at the entrance of Impulse. Campus residents and visitors can read the stories of these victims until Wednesday 11 October and learn about their important message: slavery still exists.

Do you want to know more about the histories hiding behind these thirty pairs of eyes or why WUR brought this exhibit to our campus? If so, come to the opening in the Speakers Corner at Impulse. As ambassador of CoMensha, Aldith Hunkar will hold dialogues with people involved in the exhibit. One of them is Sameena, one of the subjects, who is going to run a 100-km marathon that ends in Wageningen as a way to draw attention to modern slavery.

A project group at Facilities & Services began working on mapping out the ways in which WUR may be unwittingly contributing to the problems of human trafficking and what WUR can do to combat this. Kees Hoogendoorn, head of the Finance department at Facilities & Services and an initiator of the project group, on his motivation to put himself to work on, or better said, against human trafficking: “When I realised that there are currently around 48 million people worldwide who end up in some type of slavery and that they have no voice, I felt that I had to look in my work environment, where I could be that voice. As WUR, we can make a huge difference: not only in what we purchase, but also at all the locations in the world where we perform projects. However, you first have to become aware of what human trafficking is and this exhibit is a great tool for that. This will be a hard pill to swallow...”.

Various activities have been organised around the exhibit:

Around 4 October - Sameena’s 100-km marathon - arrives in the Square near Forum

4 October - TED talks: combat modern slavery - lunch gathering - 12.30-1.30 p.m. at Impulse.

5 October - Documentary “The end of poverty” - film night - 8.00 p.m. in the Clock House

11 October - The foods we love - lunch gathering - 12.30 p.m.-1.30 p.m. at Impulse

The exhibit and activities at Wageningen Campus are an initiative by WUR Facilities & Services, Impulse, Green Office Wageningen, and Stichting OtherWise.

The travelling exposition “Open your eyes” is an initiative by CoMensha, the national Coördinatiecentrum tegen Mensenhandel (coordination centre against human trafficking) in the Netherlands, and is carried out by Stichting Open Mind. The exhibition can be seen throughout the Netherlands. For more information visit the website, or go straight to the exhibition newspaper.