Samuel Gratacap

French, born in 1982 at Pessac (France), Samuel Gratacap lives and works in Paris. A plastic artist, he studied art at the Higher School of Fine Arts in Marseille. His work, which is both sensitive and objective, stands at the crossroads of photojournalism and contemporary art. Departing from media clichés and exploring a range of photographic techniques (medium format, polaroids, etc.) and contemporary artistic techniques (drawing, video, writing, etc.), he has created a new relationship between time and topicality via an effectively constructed artistic discourse.

(Source : Paul di Felice)

Marseille and Lampedusa, two cities that are hubs, two cities full of history, encounters, paths, movement. Samuel Gratacap’s photography and documentary project began in 2007 in Marseille, in a detention centre for undocumented immigrants: for him, it was essential to understand the political and geographical situation at play on the ground, through contact with those who experience it. This resulted in portraits and testimonies of “detainees”, men left in this in-between world.

In 2010, he went to Lampedusa, as if to make the journey in reverse, in order to return to the path travelled, to meet “those who remain” as he says, and to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. And it was there that the documentary writing became charged with life, of memories incarnated in objects, since Gratacap collected documents that belonged to migrants, gathered on the beaches of Lampedusa and in the cemeteries of clandestine boats: these are fragments of life, bits of writing, envelopes never sent, a message in a bottle that never reached its destination, photographs destroyed by time, wind and salt… He decided to photograph these marks of existence and thus testify to what has been buried, like an archaeologist bringing the past back to life.

Lampedusa is also deserted, with endless roads where the sun beats down and where an abandoned scooter sits idly.

(Source : Artist’s website, Léa Bismuth)