In November 2023, Stimultania invites photographer Mathias Zwick to lead an artist/public creation with the residents of the Givors hospital nursing home on the theme of sport. The photographer sees this as an opportunity to create with them a space dedicated to the imagination, in contrast to a medical place that is often cold and sanitized, but also to experience a moment of exchange and intergenerational sharing.

The photographer then comes with this proposal: create, in consultation with the elderly volunteers, portraits representing them with the sports outfit and accessories that they practiced, still practice or still love. The idea quickly aroused enthusiasm, both among the medical team and the residents. The shooting sessions are then organized over two weeks within the nursing home itself, which in turn becomes a tennis court, basketball court, gym or even hiking trail. In one room, Marthe and Roger improvise a game of volleyball on either side of a stretched net, in another, Georges perfects his backhand at ping-pong. Madame Malburet, with delicate hands, is preparing to score a basket while outside, Mr. Moreteau pedals in a yellow jersey, encouraged by a delirious crowd. A little further on, Madame Cellier and Madame Pironon are in full swing with their maps and backpacks. Finally, Mr. Garcia offers a demonstration of wrestling, he who has only lost one match in his life, the one against Lola who also won his heart.

In their sporting gesture, elderly people thumb their noses at a form of marginalization from society to become the main actors in a universe imbued with humor, dreaminess and poetry. Everyone gets involved, including the caregivers who are very involved from the beginning to the end of the project. After this first, colorful intervention, Mathias Zwick will return in 2024 from April to June, to continue creative work around sport in connection with different audiences.

Born in 1990, Mathias Zwick lives and works between Strasbourg, Paris and Germany. After a master's degree in law, he began a career as a lawyer but eventually turned to photography, which he came into contact with through his skateboarding. Omnipresent in this sport in the form of (photographs or video clips made to keep a trace of the figures performed by the skateboarders), photography and video punctuate the photographer's adolescence and thus give him his first subject: the practice of skateboarding in Iran following the Vienna agreements, in 2015. In 2017, he met young Kosovar people from Mitrovica, an emblematic city of the Serbian-Albanian conflict. Around a rock school created in 2008, the photographer tells the story of the slow reconciliation of individuals through music and its influences. Member of the international cooperative Inland Stories and the Hans Lucas agency, Mathias Zwick sometimes works around French news such as during the Yellow Vest movement in 2019. In March 2020, during confinement, he recounts the daily life of workers in the world of party and night. It is regularly published in the French and international press (Le Parisien, Libération, The Independent and Vice).