Bruno Fert (1971) - Case Gina. Intérieur. Italie, 2018

In the Mediterranean, off the Libyan coast, a boat burns. It will disappear like thousands of existences devoured by the waves before having reached the lights of a horizon better. The sites I photograph are on the routes taken by the exiles who dream of Europe. There I seek the scars and the traces left in the landscapes: a few pebbles gathered in a forest on the island of Samos bear witness to trajectories of lives brutally cut short. Elsewhere, it is the remnants of life jackets in colors worn by the sun that tell us of a trying crossing. One imagines silhouettes stepping off a boat to run to the shelter of the foliage, shedding the clues of their clandestine journey. Boats seized and numbered by border police lie motionless on the ground. Arrived in Italy, some write in charcoal fragments of their story on the walls of an abandoned house in the village of Case Gina. Others, dispose of their worn clothes once past the barbed wires of the French border above Menton. As our world bristles with barriers and walls, there appear as many breaches through which women and men pass or perish. These images speak to us of the incandescent trajectories of thousands of lives that shape Bruno Fert — Documentary Photographer Bruno Fert develops a deeply humanitarian body of work devoted to exile, to migrations and the traversed territories. From disappeared Palestinian villages to the precarious refuges of migrants, he photographs less the event than its traces. With Passages, he continues this work on the roads of exile, revealing in the landscapes the marks left by those who try to reach Europe. A precise and silent photograph, where the landscape becomes a bearer of memory.

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