An art museum devoted to migration has opened in Rotterdam, near the dock where Albert Einstein fled Europe to start a new life in the US.
The Fenix museum is the centrepiece of a regeneration project in the harbour-side neighbourhood Katendrecht, formerly home to Rotterdam’s red-light district and Europe’s largest Chinatown. Its opening comes at a time of hardening rhetoric against immigration in Europe.
The 16,000 sq m building, dating from 1923, was once part of the largest warehouse in the world, an important building for storage and shipping for the Holland America Line – a Dutch cargo and passenger line. The Holland America Line facilitated the journeys of millions of migrants in the 19th and 20th centuries, who arrived and departed from the surrounding docks.
