In Vivo, Sphera newsletter

Over the past twenty years, Jean-Jacques has accompanied around twenty people in their suicides through the Swiss association Exit, which he has been a member of since 2000 and co-president since 2018. For him, helping people like Suzanne to “leave a life that no longer resembles life” is an obvious choice, and an experience that has made him more serene and attentive to others.

Nadya is a 29-year old journalist and video maker. Originally from Moscow, she is currently working in exile. She has been doing Brazilian jiu jitsu on and off for 2,5 years and holds a white belt (the beginning rank) with four stripes, one stripe short of the blue belt.

Samuel is a cattle farmer in the north of the Auvergne region. Passionate about his profession, he is waging a peaceful battle against the industrial superpowers, in favour of autonomous, ecological agriculture that cares about the welfare of animals, the living conditions of farmers and the health of consumers. He calls his philosophy “sensiculture”: the cultivation of common sense.

Fausta is the daughter, sister, niece and wife of Guinean opponents repressed by the dictatorship of Teodoro Obiang. She herself is a fighter for freedom and against the impunity of a tyranny that has been in power since 1979. She has been living in exile in Madrid for seven years and is one of the initiators of a lawsuit in the Spanish National Court for the kidnapping of four activists, including her brother Martín.

Ana is 27 and lives in Tbilisi, Georgia. She works for two queer-feminist organisations and for the the largest civil society movement in her country. All three organisations, as well as Ana and her colleagues personally, are at risk of being labelled “Foreign Agents”, since the Georgian government adopted a replication of a repressive Russian law. She talks about her fight against this law.

Vincenzo is a fisherman who lives in Sapri, a village of 6,000 inhabitants in southern Italy. Despite his love for the profession that his family has practised for generations, he dreams of a different life for his children. Between regulations and climate change, making a living as small-scale fishermen has become almost impossible.

Louise is a driven woman who always pushes herself to excel. At the moment, she is preparing for the Paralympics, but already needs to plan for the next move in her career –all of that, whilst living with a disability.

Fode*, a 15-year-old Guinean, arrived in Paris in September after crossing the Mediterranean. Now, like most unaccompanied minors, he finds himself in a legal limbo where the authorities won’t look after him, in conditions that are harsher than he could ever have imagined.

Olga is 35 years old and lives in Kyiv, Ukraine. She has been working as a clown in hospitals in Kyiv for more than five years. In March 2023, with her colleague Marina she co-founded an NGO called БУП. With the Italian organisation Soccorso Clowns, under the mentorship of her teacher, Vladimir Olshansky, they teach clowns all over Europe.

Marlene is 32 years old and one of the ‘extremely rich’, having inherited her multi-millionaire grandmother’s fortune. For years, she has been thinking about how to redistribute this wealth. Iin 2024 she officially launched the Guter Rat: an assembly of 50 citizens pulled out of a hat to decide together on the best ways of democratically giving her fortune back to society.

Joseph is 56 years old. He comes from a long line of Maltese farmers. Because of climate change, he has had to change the pace of his planting and invest in huge reservoirs to cope with the drought affecting the country. But that doesn’t stop him from worrying about the future of the island’s land and its farmers.

Anne is a long-standing environmental activist. During her career as an elected representative, she found that “political courage was variable”. So after her last mandate in 2015, she joined forces with Elders for the Climate in a long and victorious legal battle, which took this association of women over 64, to the European Court of Human Rights.

Valerius is the owner of a moving company. He was born in Belarus but came to Germany when he was 18 as a Spätaussiedler, which means he is a German emigrant who returned to Germany long after his family left the country.

Sylvia, a 49-year-old carpenter, lives in Dortmund with her two children. One year ago, she joined Letzte Generation (Last Generation). The protest group, known for hunger strikes, throwing mashed potato on paintings in museums or glueing themselves to the street, recently announced their aim to run for the European elections.

Róisín is the president of the NUI Galway Feminist Society where she studies BCL law and human rights. Over the past few weeks, she campaigned in favour of an amendment of the 87-year-old Irish Constitution to get rid of the references to the role of “women within the home”. That proposal was rejected during a referendum on the 8th March, but Róisín has not changed her mind: the text should be updated.

Jupiter was born and raised in Naples. They have two Instagram profiles that coexist in the image of their two identities: that of Jupiter, a drag performer on the Neapolitan ballroom scene, and that of Antonio, the name on their identity card. They told us about the feminielli, people with fluid gender identities who have been present in Naples for centuries.

Vivienne grew up on her family farm in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. She is now studying agricultural sciences to become a farmer like her grandfather, father, and brother. But she worries about the future for German farmers.

Twelve years ago, Masha left Russia to study and then to work and live in various European countries. She shares her impressions with us, from her ten-day trip to Moscow, where she hadn’t set foot since the invasion of Ukraine.

Today, Ville proudly wears a cap bearing the words “straight edge”, but it took him a year before he publicly identified himself as such, for “fear of drinking again”. As this Finnish photographer and musician prepares a book on his journey from heavy drinking to a lifestyle free of ethanol, tobacco and meat, he reflects on his life before and after.

Bessan was born into a Palestinian family who took refuge in Syria, a country she in turn left because of her involvement in the Syrian revolution. She likes to say that she is Palestinian, because “it’s a source of pride, and a blessing, but also, in her heart, a source of sadness”. It’s a feeling and a struggle that she tries to explain to us, even if, she warns, “as we say in Arabic, ‘the hand that’s in the water is not the hand that’s in the fire’” – we can’t feel what she feels.

Daria, her husband and two of her children, left their home in Moscow after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, settled in Tel Aviv, Israel, and left her home there, too, after the Hamas attacks on October 7th. She explains what it feels like to flee and leave your home twice.

Aulonë is the Senior Editor of Kosovo 2.0 magazine. She has a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Prishtina and a graduate certificate in women, gender, and sexuality studies from the University of Kansas, U.S. Aulonë wanted to tell us about her “strange” relationship with the EU.

Eleonora grew up in Italy. She now lives in Fier and for the past year and a half has been working on the KeBuono project via the Engim association. In 2018, for the first time in Albania, the association was entrusted with the management of a property that had been confiscated from the mafia and which is now home to the social patisserie. The country now has two more.

Belligerency is the stage name of Sergejs, an artist and co-founder of the drag & queer show Propaganda in Brussels. Belligerency is Latvian and Armenian, and with his co-founders Krasna and King Kovaci they seek to spotlight marginalised and erased queerness and give voice to the LGBTQIA+ community in Eastern & Southern Europe and West Asia. Their past shows included performances on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Armenian genocide, political repressions in the Soviet Union and revolutions.

This summer, Nicolas and 24 other French firefighters spent a month and a half in Greece on a pre-positioning mission. The mission, which was created by the European Civil Protection Mechanism, was designed to enable units from different European countries to coordinate their forces in anticipation of the summer fires. Over the course of two months, Nicolas and his colleagues fought fires that ravaged hundreds of thousands of hectares of countryside. As the mission draws to a close, the captain looks back on these difficult weeks.

As a trans person, Mark didn’t feel he was in a very “supportive environment” in his native Russia and had long dreamed of leaving. The conflict in Ukraine and the possibility of being called up prompted him to do so sooner than expected. But the various requests he has made for a humanitarian visa in order to pursue his life elsewhere, have not yet been answered, leaving Mark “stuck” in Tajikistan, for eleven months, just waiting.

Nour was manager of the McDonald’s restaurant in Saint-Barthélémy, in the northern suburbs of Marseille, and is now manager of Après M, the fast-food restaurant created by former employees of the American firm after a long struggle. He has chosen to recount one of the first particularly intense stages of this struggle, which he believes proves that you have to be prepared to go all the way, because “it may take 1 year, 2 years, 10 years, 20 years, but it will pay off”.

When Marat was born in Baku in 1989, the Soviet Union was on its last legs and the first war between Armenia and Azerbaijan was breaking out. The creation of the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh by the Armenians living in the region, which officially belonged to Azerbaijan, was at stake. The first war (1989-1994) was followed by a second in 2020. In the meantime, Marat, his Armenian father and his Azerbaijani mother, immigrated to Moscow and then Seattle. Marat tells us about the influence this conflict has had on his life and identity.

Thomas is a Breton born and bred. He left the region when he was 18 and has been living in Malta for five years with his Hungarian wife and eight-year-old twins. Today, he is capable of conducting a conversation in eight languages, but he has one major regret. When he was a kid, his family never taught him Breton. And so, when his sons were born, he “naturally” decided to speak to them in the language.

Simon is a Belgian environmental activist. On the 25th March, he, alongside thousands of others, took part in a two-day demonstration in Sainte-Soline, France, to prevent the construction of a mega-basin, a huge 628,000m3 water reservoir. The demonstration was severely repressed – more than 5,000 tear bombs were thrown – resulting in 47 gendarmes being injured and 200 demonstrators, including 40 seriously injured. By going to Sainte-Soline Simon feels that he has taken part in a very important moment in the environmental movement.

Silvana is a retired gynaecologist in Italy but continues to provide consultations. In her country, abortion has been legal since 1978, but medical staff can invoke the right to 'conscientious objection' and refuse to perform abortions. In 2021, seven out of ten gynaecologists in Italy were conscientious objectors. She chose to share with us a memory that illustrates the dangers of conscientious objection and her concerns about respect for the right to abortion in Italy.