L'attente
In 2015, France wanted to dismantle the Calais jungle. To avoid the concentration of thousands of migrants in the small towns of the north, it opens two hundred structures spread over the entire territory, so-called CAO (Reception and Orientation Center) to house them.
During the 2017 summer, a friend told me about this place lost in the Limousin hills, where young men from Sudan, Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan were staying for a few months or years while waiting to see if their asylum application was accepted. I fantasized the contrast between the hills of the French countryside and the diverse landscapes they had to cross to get there.During my first visit in October 2017, most of the inhabitants of the CAO, young men between the ages of 18 and 30, were not coming out much of the abandoned holiday center and the fifteen or so cottages that constitutes it. The days were lost in an endless wait. Between discussion and contemplation. Between football games and television screens spitting out a language they do not understand. Fantasized contrast does not exist, but these small, standardized suburban houses and its inhabitants, so young with such a heavy past, offer a powerful and complex portrait of the migratory crisis the world knows today. These young men, with their deep gaze and childlike expression, are the survivors of wars, but also the selected survivors that Western government had to orchestrate while closing their borders. It is hard to imagine what they went through. These words in their mouth whistle like bullets or lashes. Darfur, Libya, boat, Italy, France, Dublin, eviction. And they are there, on Limousin hills, protected and imprisoned in this small subdivision waiting to obtain a refugee status. They wait between a past they want to forget and a future that does not exist yet. Between here and nowhere yet. On a lost island.
L'attente is the first chapter of a long term project about the migration policy in France.
L'attente was shortlisted for the Dummy award 2018 at Les Rencontres d'Arles under the title Lost Island