Photographs taken by Amar, Lekso and Malkhaz.
Artistic intention thought and led by Alexandre Guirkinger, photographer
Creation time conducted in Strasbourg over two times three days in May 2022.
With the Reception Center for Asylum Seekers of the Foyer Notre-Dame association
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.
Alexandre Guirkinger was invited to intervene in Strasbourg in May 2022, a few months after the Givordine intervention. There he met Malkhaz, Amar and Lekso, all three inhabitants of Strasbourg for less than a year. Together, they question their relationship to the territory and the city that welcomes them. As for the intervention in Givors, the participants are led to choose places in the city linked to a story, a memory or simply a feeling.
The first difficulties are emerging. Quickly, the participants identify places in the four corners of the city, which presages long journeys between each image. Time is also tight. To face these difficulties and support the photographer, Stimultania invited two students from the Haute École des Arts du Rhin to join the project. Their role: to provide the best possible support to the participants during the location scouting, thus allowing Alexandre Guirkinger to circulate more easily between the pairs.
The images are then produced 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, made available by the Haute École des Arts du Rhin. Then, they recounted, in their mother tongue, what the landscape evoked for them.
The photographs and texts will be presented in a book which will join the collection of Alexandre Guirkinger published by RVB Books: the artist is carrying out this project in several cities in France, creating a kind of poetic and sensitive cartography of the French territory drawn up by those who inhabit it without being born there.
Migrations, Givors
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.