PHOTO:Samuel Gratacap-Plus Près
Every day almost 34,000 people are forced to flee their homes because of military conflicts. French photographer Samuel Gratacap photographs migrants who reside in refugee camps and studies how they live, what rights they have access to, and what they could hope for in the future. His projects are the result of the time needed to understand the complexity of situations and to restore what, beyond numbers, flows, maps, geopolitical data, and media news, constitutes the heart: trajectories and personal experiences.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire Archive
Samuel Gratacap’s solo exhibition “Plus Près” at the Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire is a look back at seven years of his work in the Mediterranean. He has been following the lives of refugees and migrants since 2007, documenting the transitory spaces they came to occupy after crossing the Mediterranean Sea. Into the administrative detention center of Marseille in 2007, Samuel Gratacap shot people looking for a future, for what they call “luck”. He also collected testimonies that brought him to Lampedusa Island in 2010. There he tried to capture the “shameful” side of the Italian island. “My work reflects the space-time specificities of this living place shaped by wait. Wait due to the different stages of asylum applications for refugees, combined with the tension of those suspended destinies in a same temporary site that became perennial by circumstances, to finally disappear”. From the documents he found, Samuel Gratacap built a subjective story that brought him further away, to Zarzis, a coastal city of South Tunisia, and then to the Choucha camp, a refugee camp located in Tunisia, 5 kilometers from the border post with Libya and about 20 kilometers from the city of Ben Guerdane. Founded in February 2011, several hundred thousand refugees were in transit there during the Libyan civil war and the NATO attacks. While Libyan refugees are welcomed into Tunisian families and settle temporarily in Tunis or in the camp of Remada, the refugees of Sub-Saharan origin go to Choucha. He first went there in January 2012, to accompany a reporter. Confronted with the rules of short-term reporting, he had to cope with the complex reality of the camp and with his own difficulties to render an image. Although it officially closed in June 2013, 300 people remained in the desolate expanse of sand, lacking water and food supplies. Some had acquired refugee status but could then not find any country that would allow them entrance. Others were the so-called rejected. They chose the harsh living conditions in the desert above returning to their own, unsafe countries. The photographer then travelled to Tripoli where he continued his work on confinement places and waiting zones for daily workers.
Info: Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire, 17 Rue des Filles du Calvaire, Paris, Duration: 27/1-24/2/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:30, www.fillesducalvaire.com
