Nowhere is Everywhere

"Nowhere is Everywhere" is an artistic photography project that talks about Ukrainian refugees and the feeling of loneliness they feel. I start from the idea that these people were as if "teleported" to a place that they did not know and didn't choose.

February 24, 2022, Russia launches a military offensive against Ukraine, attempting to invade it.

Thousands of Ukrainians are leaving their country in search of a land of asylum. France is one of them.

July 2022, I leave Paris to settle in Nice. At the same time, a Ukrainian family fleeing the war moved in on the apartment opposite to mine, my new neighbors. This meeting touched me by directly confronting me with the condition of these people, forced to flee their country, their loved ones, their roots, their daily life.

“Nowhere Is Everywhere” presents refugees, men, women, children who, for the most part, 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 that they do not know, that they often have not even chosen, learn again, find new benchmarks. Language, work, administration, so many challenges, so many new sources of anxiety and isolation.

The pathologies caused by this forced exile are multiple. Homesickness is of course the first thing that comes to mind, having to leave your country in such a hurry leaves no one unscathed. Added to this are nostalgia, fear, helplessness, anger, sadness.

Then there is this feeling of loneliness, of isolation. Loneliness when faced with your family, with your friends that you no longer see, that you have lost or of whom you have little or no news. Isolation from your past, your life before. Loneliness in the face of this new daily life, the feeling of not being at your place here or elsewhere. This loneliness that inhabits you, that eats away at you like a cancer.

My work does not seek to bear witness to the new living conditions of these people. Its intention is to highlight the loneliness and isolation that inhabit them and tend to increase in intensity over time for some of them.

Also, I present them alone, decontextualized, facing themselves, facing the immensity of what they have to accomplish. Because even if we are surrounded, we remain alone in the face of our inner traumas and this uprooting.

As if teleported into a new world that they discover, alone facing the challenges that are now theirs and that they must face daily, facing their past, while having to coexist, for some of them, with the feeling that they abandoned their homeland, their loved ones, their friends, like deserters, or worse, enemies.

The images, staged, illustrate rather than testify, photography seen as hyperbole of a reality often ignored.

The image, to perhaps accept yourself a little more, to translate with your own means what you feel and which you cannot express in words what your interlocutors often do not understand. An image to tell a story.

Between resilience and suffering, these images also question us about our view of refugees, of these people about whom we know nothing and whose fate and history have forced them to leave their homeland; these people from whom our gaze so often turns away without seeking to know or understand.