On February 24, 2022, Russia launches a military offensive against Ukraine, attempting to invade it.
Thousands of Ukrainians leave their country in search of a place of refuge. France is one of the countries that welcomes them.
In July 2022, I leave Paris to settle in Nice. At the same time, a Ukrainian family fleeing the war moves into the apartment across the landing from mine, becoming my new neighbours. This encounter affects me deeply by confronting me directly with the situation of people forced to flee their country, their loved ones, their roots, their everyday lives.
“Nowhere Is Everywhere” presents refugees — men, women and children — most of whom have lost everything, left everything behind; some will probably never see their native country again.
Torn from their world, exiled, they must rebuild themselves in a place they do not know, one they often did not even choose, learn again, and find new points of reference. Language, work, administration: so many challenges, so many new sources of anxiety and isolation.
The psychological suffering caused by this forced exile can take many forms. Homesickness is of course the first thing that comes to mind: having to leave one’s country in such haste leaves no one unscathed. Added to this are nostalgia, fear, helplessness, anger and sadness.
Then there is this feeling of loneliness, of isolation. The loneliness of being separated from family and friends you no longer see, whom you have lost, or from whom you receive little or no news. Isolation from your past, from your former life. Loneliness in the face of a new daily reality, the feeling of belonging neither here nor elsewhere. This loneliness that lives inside you, eating away at you like a cancer.
My work does not seek to document these people’s new living conditions. Its intention is to bring to light the loneliness and isolation that inhabit them and, for some, tend to grow more intense over time.
I therefore portray them alone, decontextualized, facing themselves, facing the immensity of what they have to accomplish. Because even when we are surrounded by others, we remain alone with our inner traumas and with this uprooting.
As if teleported into a new world they are discovering, alone before the challenges that are now theirs and that they must confront every day, facing their past, while some must also live with the feeling that they have abandoned their homeland, their loved ones, their friends — like deserters, or worse, enemies.
The images, staged, illustrate rather than bear witness; photography is conceived as a hyperbole of a reality that is often ignored.
The image, perhaps to accept oneself a little more, to translate through its own means what one feels and cannot express in words that those around you often do not understand.
An image to tell a story.
Between resilience and suffering, these photographs also question the way we look at refugees, at people about whom we know nothing and whose fate and history have forced them to leave their homeland; people from whom we so often turn our gaze away without trying to know or understand.
March 2024: after a year of working with refugees, it becomes increasingly clear to me that something is missing from my reflection, from my work. Spending time with these refugees naturally leads me to question and take an interest in their loved ones, in those who stayed behind.
What does it mean to see a member of one’s family leave for another country, start again from nothing, in an environment unknown to both the one who leaves and those who remain?
This sense of distance, of the unknown, of absence.
A refugee told me: “After two years in France, I have changed, but my city has not changed, except that the cemetery has filled up considerably; I no longer feel that I belong there.”
Faced with this established reality, I question how these lives evolve: those who have left, whose lives are transformed by departure but also by life in another country, another culture, another society, and by the daily fear that their loved ones may be touched by the horror of war; and those who have stayed behind, facing every day the hardships of war, fear, absence and separation.
I feel this need to meet the families and loved ones of the refugees I have been photographing for a year.
I therefore decide to go to Ukraine to meet them.
My intention is then to photograph, throughout the country, the families or loved ones of the refugees who were the subjects of the first part, thereby creating a bridge between two worlds separated by war.
So I leave in my car with my equipment so that I can continue to work in the same way: lighting my scenes, staging those who stayed in Ukraine, in order to illustrate what I am trying to express.
