The Maurice-Duhamel vocational school in Loos has a boarding facility that mainly takes in young migrants and unaccompanied minors to train them in construction trades. During workshops, they retraced the journey that brought them from their country of origin to their city of residence. From the Sahara to Europe, via the hell of Libya and shipwrecks in the Mediterranean, the map of their journey was drawn up.
They could be these shadows, with slumped shoulders, resigned to misery and indifference, who squat in the margins, under bridges and in the parks of our cities in utter destitution. They could be these shadows, crushed, reduced to numbers, scorned by our leaders, our administrations, our police, who treat them as if they were the threat, contrary to the Geneva Convention of 1951, a promise of international solidarity in the aftermath of the Second World War. They threw away their childhood and walked until they were worn out, in the hope of a better life.
Because they have the same mark of shame on their forehead: “migrant”, to which we must now add: they are unaccompanied minors. From distant lands, Afghanistan, sub-Saharan Africa or the East, they threw away their childhood and walked until they were worn out in the hope of a better life.
They have experienced the survivor’s odyssey of the Sahara, the hell of Libya, ships sinking in the Mediterranean Sea, violence, hunger… Today, they have a new life at the Maurice Duhamel Vocational College where they have brand new horizons.
https://www.brigittepatient.com/ecoutez-voir/cedric-gerbehaye
For Institut pour la photographie de Lille. Exhibition and trilingual publication.
