
Empire
- Publisher
- LE BAL / Filigranes Éditions
- Year
- 2015
- Specifications
- Hardcover
18 × 29 cm
116 pages
70 illustrations
French / English
Texts by Samuel Gratacap in collaboration with Léa Bismuth
Accounts by Bright, Fadoma, Khadija, S.D., Favor, Zahra, Omar and Karim Traoré, refugees at Choucha
Set in Tunisia five kilometres from the Libyan border post, the Choucha camp became a place of transit for several hundred thousand refugees of sub-Saharan origin who had to flee the war in Libya. Since 2011, when the camp appeared in the Tunisian desert, Gratacap followed the daily life of those refugees. His work in pictures and video gives an account of the particular space and time of a place of living marked by waiting: the waiting bound up with the successive stages of the asylum claims lodged by the refugees, mixed with the tension of destinies suspended in a temporary place that became permanent by force of circumstance, only to disappear in the end. The plain, classical format underlines the strength of the work.