DE-SOL-ES, childhoud in exile

Photographic series on childhood in exile, produced during an artistic residency at France Terre d’Asile.

Exile

Exile is round

A circle, a ring:

your feet go around it, you cross the earth,

and it’s only the earth,

day dawns, and it’s not yours,

night arrives: your stars are missing,

you find yourself brothers: and it’s not your blood.

You’re like a ghost who blushes

not to love more those who love you so much,

and isn’t it strange indeed that you miss

the enemy thorns of your homeland,

the bitter distress of your people,

the troubles that await you,

which will show their teeth as soon as you enter the door…

Pablo Neruda

Ama

Ama is 14 years old and comes from Daloa, Côte d’Ivoire. She is the youngest of 7 children. Her uncle had decided to marry her off by force. One night, she fled with only the clothes on her back and money borrowed from her mother. Her journey lasted 6 months. Ama took the bus to Burkina Faso, then on to Niger…

Soufiane

…Soufiane also recounts the hell of the Mediterranean crossing. He waits for weeks in a camp. Finally, tonight. He waits by the sea, gunfire breaks out, a few migrants are hit, and he has to flee…

Rêve et cauchemar

Under the threat of Juju: they were ‘held’ by the voodoo ritual. When they arrived, the mamas pulled out their hair and cut their fingernails. The girls have been familiar with the Juju ceremony since childhood…

Koffi

The eldest of 7 children, he was 16 when he left Somalia, dreaming of better days for himself and his family.

He crossed Sudan, passing through the desert plains of Darfur, by car and sometimes on foot, and crossed the border into Libya. Then the trouble began: he was kidnapped twice in Libya by militias.

The project

Childhood and exile are two words that shouldn’t go together. We can’t imagine them living together.

And yet in 2017, 18,000 children arrived alone in France, fleeing poverty, abuse, exploitation, war.

What does it mean to be an unaccompanied migrant child in France? How much of their childhood is left to them? To answer these questions, I set out to meet the unaccompanied migrant children arriving in France: I recreated my life-size “darkroom” at France Terre d’Asile, which welcomed me in residence.

Like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, the migration journey deprives the child of his or her own childhood, provoking the fear of oblivion, the erasure of the feeling of existing.

I lived with these children, collected their testimonies and photographed their reflections. Through this series, I sought to recover fragments of their lost identity, to express in my lacquered paintings their confusion and extreme vulnerability, but also their determination, the courage that brought them through the world…

For they are children, but also heroes of their time.

They’ve crossed deserts, they’ve walked miles by night to cross borders, they’ve taken the Balkan route, they’ve found themselves lost in the middle of the Mediterranean, they’ve braved cold, hunger and violence, they have talents – drawing, singing, music, languages, they have a burning desire to learn. They are young migrants today, and perhaps the future adults of tomorrow’s France.

They are waiting in the in-between that will decide their future.

The portraits that result from my encounters with them are troubled, without contours, just sketched out like their future in France.

Laetitia Lesaffre photographie

‘But then,’ says Alice, ‘if the world makes absolutely no sense, what’s to stop us inventing one?’

 Lewis Carroll