This project is a series of five portraits, drawn in graphite from photographs sent to me by each of the subjects. The development of this project stems from my involvement in an artistic intervention called "Maison.Rester.Etranger", led by the artist Barbara Manzetti. Through my long involvement or proximity to this project, I got to know the participants personally and became a kind of part of them. I was particularly interested in the photographs that we showed each other during the many conversations we had. These photographs, moments captured as they embarked on a new chapter in their lives, serve as powerful testimonies, affirming their presence at a time when their administrative recognition by the state is uncertain. I found that photographs of oneself are an important element of an immigrant's life. Archives, narratives and memory are an important part of migrant identity. The decision to present this drawing in this way was inspired by my reading of an essay by Arjun Appadurai, in which he argues that migrants' claims on the hospitality of the nations they land in are always in a grey zone between hospitality, sanctuary and imprisonment, because they are usually in a categorical grey zone that combines features of the stranger, the victim, the criminal and the undocumented visitor. He further argues that although migrants today, like migrants throughout human history, move either to escape a terrible life, to seek a better one, or both, the only new fact in the world of electronic mediation is that the archive of possible lives is now richer and more available to ordinary people than ever before. There is thus a greater supply of material from which ordinary people can create scripts of possible worlds and imagined selves. Grey in tone, sometimes realistically rendered and sometimes not very clear, the portraits express some ambiguous bodies, with uncertainties about their presence and absence. The drawings have been laid horizontally on the floor and held in place by small pebbles from the road at the edges of each drawing.
Graphite on paper
150 X 80 cm each
