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What Is Europe to You? - A Portrait of Europe Through Its People

Since 2019, the Italian artist Lisa Borgiani has travelled across Europe asking strangers one simple question: What is Europe to you?  The answers she receives - hopeful, critical, emotional, political, personal - form the heart of the ongoing exhibition What Is Europe to You?, put on display at the EU Delegation in Geneva, a photographic project that transforms individual voices into a collective portrait of Europe itself. The exhibition was inaugurated in Geneva in the presence of Lisa Borginani at this year’s Europe Day celebrations, attended by nearly 1000 people.

Amb Potzel Exhibition Interview
© EUDEL 2026

 

Since then, the exhibition is displayed at the EU Delegation premises. EU Ambassador Deike Potzel walked through the gallery reflecting on the portraits and offering personal stories on the overarching question. She shared her own thoughts on European identity, emphasising that Europe is shaped not only by institutions and politics, but above all by its people and cultures. To find out what Europe means to Ambassador Potzel and which one her favourite portrait is, watch our short recap video of the visit.

 

I was posted to Singapore some time ago - There I really felt my European inner self. I know that was the case with a lot of my friends from Europe as well. You realise how close we are, how aligned we are, how similar we actually are... and I know that a lot of my Ambassador colleagues feel the same. Europe is really home. – EU Ambassador Deike Potzel

From Athens and Berlin to Paris, Riga, Kraków and beyond, Borgiani photographs people she encounters in the streets, capturing European life. Rather than presenting Europe as an abstract political concept, the exhibition explores Europe as a lived experience, inviting visitors to reflect on citizenship, identity, belonging, democracy, migration, solidarity, and cultural diversity through the voices of ordinary people. Through this, the exhibition has evolved into a growing archive of emotions and perspectives. One of the defining aspects of What Is Europe to You? is its participatory nature. Visitors are not only spectators but contributors, and in recent years, this also involved the integration of voices from Ukraine.

The idea behind the body of work is to collect portraits and feelings of the people living in different cities. I discovered that there are so many different and unique feelings and ideas of Europe. So it’s great to put them one beside the other and create a dialogue, between different identities as part of a community. – Lisa Borgiani, Artist

 

What emerges throughout the exhibition is not a single definition of Europe, but a mosaic of perspectives. For many, Europe represents freedom, peace, opportunity, and democracy. Together, these portraits create an intimate and deeply human reflection on what it means to belong to a shared European community in the 21st century.