Breaking Point

(work in progress)Breaking Point is about people in exile and their waiting in Greece for the papers. Time is stopped and with the routine comes boredom and disillusion. Loneliness is one exil’s burden. But their willpower is stronger.

Since a couple of years, my artistic practice focuses on themes regarding identity, history and exile.

In 2017 I self-published a book about present exile in the Aegean Sea and its consequences on identity with a parallel about communist’s forced exiles on the islands during Greek dictatorship.

Due to the complexity of this subject I felt the need to continue developing this project. Consequently, a new project appeared focusing on the feeling of waiting before receiving the papers in Greece.

I continued working there because of its specificities such as being the first European territory that people see after leaving their countries.

Started in September 2017, I traveled regularly in Greece. In total I will have been able to spend four months there, after the first trip in Chios in January 2018. The next travel will be in April in Athens.

In this way, I met people on the islands, we spent time together, stayed in touch and met again in Athens few months later.

For this project, I traveled in Chios, Leros, Oenophyta and Athens.

By being a witness of their situations evolutions, I can question the process and its large consequences. This is why it was necessary for me to travel there regularly.

This project about exile comes from a personal reflexion and interrogation about the relation of a person to a new and unknown territory, with its consequences on identity. A feeling that the author Milan Kundera analyzed a lot for example.

Recognizing the complexity of this subject, I am questioning here the waiting. This in-between moment, on the edge, that mind and body can’t accept. A physical tension appears from some bodies while others show a deep weariness. On the edge, others express the absence of development.

How to translate visually the consequences on a body trapped in a foreign territory without bearings and certainties?

Through a picture of little girl asleep or two men embracing each others, a balance seems to appear within this state. However, it never lasts and a state of uncertainty remains.

This is from moments spent with my contacts (or their absence) that pictures come from.

During those exchanges complex emotions and questions are always present, that I am trying to translate into images.

Consequently, I can only wonder about my own position as a photographer unable to truly understand their reality, therefore about a society which doesn’t try to understand the complexity of this situation.

This project, which will also be a book, aims to bring together individual stories from different characters in one larger and universal story of migration, relations to time and territory.