The Europeans – a Photographic Time Piece of European Heartland in the 21st Century

The Europeans is a ten year project (2020-2030) painting a portrait of modern Europe, looking beyond nationalism, searching for a greater European identity. The makers will visit countless seemingly insignificant places and surrounding regions. Places that rarely make the news. In every region they collaborate with local partners in media and cultural worlds and conclude with a local exhibition including the launch of a separate publication. All these regions and publications combined will in the long run be the inspiration for their final book and exhibition cycle – a time piece of European Heartland in the 21st century. The European Cultural Foundation supports this project.

Below you will find The Europeans’ contribution to our 2025 annual magazine, Common Ground.

On January 24, 2025, four days after Donald Trump’s second inauguration as the 47th President of the United States of America, Ireland recorded the strongest wind gusts ever. An extreme storm, just shy of a hurricane. Meteorologists say the chances of a “perfect storm” are increasing in Europe too. As the waters of the Atlantic Ocean around the equator continue to warm, storms are no longer confined on their natural course to the Caribbean and Florida — they now track northward, battering Ireland, Great Britain, and Western Europe. The perfect storm, with climate change deniers taking power the same week such a storm actually hits Europe.

The perfect storm — it could become the subtitle of the 2020s. A decade marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, which temporarily brought the world to a halt. A decade where illiberal democracy and autocracy are on the rise, even within the European Union, while Russia seizes the opportunity to annex a hard-fought democracy like Ukraine.

In the midst of this perfect storm, we – photographer Rob Hornstra and writer/filmmaker Arnold van Bruggen – are working on The Europeans, a ten-year project documenting a continent in transition. In Lithuania, we saw how vulnerable Lithuanians feel living next to their large, long-feared neighbor, Russia. Yet, at the same time, we witnessed how Lithuanians fear increasingly liberal and progressive influences from the West. Can you fight autocracy while restricting your own citizens’ freedoms?

In southern Spain, we visited Europe’s vegetable garden — endless fields packed with greenhouses run by small and large farmers alike. With the powerful sun here, they need only water to harvest multiple crops a year. Many of these farmers vote for far-right parties, even though most of the labor is done by countless migrants from African countries — people still making the perilous journey from Senegal, Morocco, Libya, or Algeria every week. They flee poor economies, unstable governments, and, increasingly, climate change. As they search for work, income, and stability, politicians exploit their arrival to stoke fear and sow instability for their own gain.

In southern Spain, hotels are closing because summers are becoming unbearably hot. Water, piped in from the country’s interior, is running out. Vegetable cultivation, the low wages of often undocumented African workers, the stranglehold of multinational supermarket chains — southern Spain, too, is caught in the perfect storm. It fuels the rise of far-right, populist parties like Vox. Does that help? No. It only fans the flames. But for a brief moment, the electorate can vent their anger — until the storm topples them too.

We’re trying to make sense of it all: the stories, the contradictions, the Europeans who sometimes seem to act against their own interests. We’re not doing it alone. The Europeans is supported by funds like the ECF and Mondriaan Fund, alongside dozens of donors who believe in the project’s mission. Thanks to them, we can keep investing in this work, aiming to deliver a powerful account of this era by 2030 — through books, reports, and exhibitions.

Visit our website theeuropeans.fm to learn more. The perfect storm deserves a perfect chronicle.