The project began with a group of students from the Porto Higher Education School and resulted in an exhibition, “Us and Them”, which will be opened, also on Tuesday, at the Municipal Archive of Póvoa de Varzim.

At the end of the school project, the students wanted to “do something more to change the situation” and challenged Raul Manarte, the author of the portraits in the exhibition, to join the collective.

This interaction resulted in a pilot project, which also includes a group of migrants and refugees living in Portugal, from Cape Verde, Ghana, Palestine, Syria, and Ukraine, and portrayed in the exhibition.

In a statement, the authors justify the initiative as a response to the “multiplying occurrences of tension, violence, and negligence [against migrants and refugees] that have occurred in the country”.

The Balcão de Denúncia pilot project, designed for six months (but which, if supported by the end of that period, will last) aims to be “a kind of public service”, providing a “permanent display of data” resulting from complaints from migrants and refugees, Raul Manarte explained to Lusa.

Through the platform, complainants will be able to freely report what happened and decide whether to do so anonymously.

At the same time, they will have to provide some data, which will generate quantitative statistics, namely about the entities or spaces in question and the type of occurrences (lack of information, inaccessibility of services, harassment, violence, etc.).

With this, it will be possible to “analyse the patterns”, in order to promote “a more accurate view of the difficulties that the migrant and refugee population experiences in Portugal”, states Raul Manarte.

The authors of the project have “two clear objectives”, on the one hand “to compile the complaints received and transform them into public data” – namely by disseminating them to the media and on social networks – and, at the same time, to use this data in campaigns, “pressuring structures or decision-makers to take concrete steps to reduce or eradicate the occurrences observed”.