Photographs taken by Ali, Fkadu, Habib, Nicole, Nuhas, Omid, Souleyman.
Artistic intention thought and led by Alexandre Guirkinger, photographer
Creation time conducted in Givors over two weeks in March 2022.
With the Center for Asylum Seekers and Refugee Forum.
Intervention carried by Stimultania as part of the national program of transmission and photographic practice workshops Between images developed by the Diagonal Network supported by the Ministry of Culture.
To discover the podcast produced by Diagonal around the Cherbourg project, it's here.
Registered intervention within the program Make faces carried by Stimultania on Givors in 2022, supported by the National Agency for Territorial Cohesion, the DRAC Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Region and the city of Givors.
They have been living in Givors for two, four, eight months. They are from Afghanistan, Congo, Cameroon, Eritrea, Bangladesh. For two weeks, in March 2022, they worked with photographer Alexandre Guirkinger around the notion of territory and landscape.
Everyone was invited to choose a place in the city, emblematic and personal, linked to a story, a feeling, then to photograph it and put it into words. According to Alexandre Guirkinger: “Producing thoughtful images of a territory also means understanding it and making it one's own. »
After a period of scouting, the images were taken in the view camera – a return to the beginnings of photography – on film sheets in 20×25 cm format. A new way of looking, of framing, of recording. The participants then printed the photographs in a film laboratory and told, in their mother tongue, what the landscape evoked for them.
The photographs and the texts are presented in a book which joins the collection of Alexandre Guirkinger published by RVB Books: the artist leads this project in several cities of France, carrying out a kind of poetic and sensitive cartography of the French territory drawn up by those who inhabit it without being born there.
Born in 1980, Alexander Guirkinger lives and works in Paris, developing for ten years a photographic work around the borders. 1er chapter, Line, which deals with the Maginot Line, ended in 2016 with an exhibition at the Rencontres d'Arles and the publication of a book co-signed with Tristan Garcia by RVB Books. In 2017, he initiated a second chapter, Waiting, relating to the administrative fields of the border. In 2020, an invitation from Point du Jour in Cherbourg enabled him to initiate new research, Migration, this time with the idea of including migrant people in the shooting process.
