This post is also available in: French

Photographer whose work is situated both in the field of visual arts and photojournalism, Samuel Gratacap is interested in the phenomena of migration and transit sites issued of contemporary conflicts. His projects are the result of long periods of immersion, time necessary to understand the complexity of situations and to recreate what, beyond numbers, flows, maps, geopolitical data and news media, constitutes their core: paths and personal experiences.

His ambitious project entitled ”Empire” resulted of several stays he had made in the Choucha refugee camp located in Tunisia, a few kilometers from the Libyan border, between 2012 and 2014.

During several years, starting from February 2011, this camp, urgently created by the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), has seen hundreds of thousands people fleeing the conflicts in neighboring Libya, but also those in West Africa and the Horn of Africa.

Although the camp was officially closed in June 2013, several hundreds refugees and asylum seekers continued living there in an ever-increasing abandonment.

The images comprising Empire reflect moments of life, of adaptation to the hostility of the environment, but also of commitment. They represent faces, gestures, pieces of desert, makeshift constructions, messages of claim, ”wandering souls” touring the camp. Together, they outline the contours of an unresolved situation: ”My work,” says the artist, ”tells about the special space-time of this living place marked by waiting. Waiting linked to the various stages of asylum applications submitted by the refugees, which mixes with the tension of these destinies suspended in a temporary place which, by the force of things, became perennial to finally disappear.”

Marked by a temporality which contrasts with the one of the images of the news feed, Samuel Gratacap’s photographs also make part of a quest for forms which is entirely driven by the desire to aptly incorporate singular experiences.

Photographic prints of different formats are complemented by Polaroid series, a set of images affixed to the wall, the transcription of stories, a plan drawn by the artist and video sequences. As if it were about trying to restore, through these multiple fragments, the singularity of Choucha’s voices: ”There is not a story of Choucha,” says Samuel Gratacap, ”but as many stories as the number of people who had lived there.” – Christophe Gallois