A group of three men is crossing the Valley of Montgenevre from Italy trying to reach the next city of Briançon (France). The crossing can take 6 to 10 hours, depending on the presence of the French border patrol and military. Migrants have to hide through the mountain for not being arrested and pushback in Italy.

These lookouts in the valley of Montgenevre are essential to the creation and preservation of a safe route for migrants between Italy and France. Those in solidarity prefer to remain anonymous because they risk problems with the justice system for "facilitating illegal entry into the french territory". BILATERAL, 2017-2019 (ITALIA-FRANCE)

An image outside of place, outside of time, like an apparition. These three men from Darfur were leaving the Choucha camp to visit friends in Tunis, a nine-hour drive from here. They wanted a “change of scenery” and a return to a life that seemed completely normal, at least for few days. EMPIRE, 2012-2014 (TUNISIA)

Departure days were both sad and beautiful for the fact that some people could go and some people no. The reality of the camp was so complex; it was important to find a way to make it apparent, starting from a distance, and then getting increasingly closer. There is not one precise story of Choucha, but instead as many stories as the number of the people who’ve been there. I obviously missed some stories, some pictures. I forced myself to find the “right” approach and the “right” moment to document this place as the hostile environment it is. The desert, the sandstorms, the waiting, the everyday moments (the food, the hairdresser), the days of departure.

Time passed slowly and people felt more and more abandoned until that decisive moment, in July 2013, when humanitarian organizations “closed” Choucha camp and left more than three hundred people with no food, no water. Men, women, and children were rejected as asylum seekers. EMPIRE, 2012-2014 (TUNISIA)

Empire photographic series is the result of several visits to the Choucha refugee camp, located in Tunisia, a few kilometres from the Libyan border, between 2012 and 2014. For several years (as of February 2011), this UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) emergency camp received hundreds of thousands of people fleeing conflicts in neighbouring Libya, as well as those in West Africa and the Horn of Africa. Although it officially closed in June 2013, several hundred refugees and asylum-seekers have continued to live in Choucha, in a state of growing abandonment.

I entered Zawiya detention center for the first time in December 2014. I had to be quick, I was given an hour, followed by a policeman who hurries me on and forbids some men to talk to me, allows some others, arbitrarily. We are in the prison yard surrounded by great breeze-block walls. A hundred people or so are gathered there. The guards made the prisoners squat for “image purposes”. Staging, humiliation : practices for media which seem common practice in the place. I object to them. I decided to begin with the testimonies and not to make pictures first. Intimacy could keep me away from all staging. FIFTY FIFTY, 2014-2017 (LIBYA)

After crossing the desert and the sea, it's now the mountains' turn to be crossed. The journey from the city of Claviere (Italy) until the refuge of the city of Briançon (France) can take up to 10 hours of walking and is very hard and quite challenging as the French police border patrol and French military are going around by feet and by vehicles. BILATERAL, 2017-2019 (ITALIA-FRANCE)

These lookouts in the Montgenevre valley are essential to the creation and preservation of a safe route for migrants between Italy and France. Those in solidarity prefer to remain anonymous because they risk problems with the justice system for "facilitating illegal entry into the french territory".

The valley of Montgenevre is home to numerous initiatives in support of migrants. One of the most useful and creative, in my opinion, is the use of color to mark trails and ensure safe passage for people wishing to cross into France from Italy. BILATERAL, 2017-2019 (ITALIA-FRANCE)

Samuel Gratacap

1982, France

Nominee - Prix Elysée 2025

Samuel Gratacap (FR, 1982) is a French photographer whose work spans documentary photography and photojournalism. He is interested in the phenomena of migration and places of transit generated by contemporary conflicts. His projects are the result of long periods of immersion, taking the time needed to understand the complexity of situations and to restore what, beyond numbers, flows, maps and geopolitical data, constitutes the heart of the matter: trajectories and personal experiences.

Samuel Gratacap graduated from Marseille’s School of Fine Arts; his work has been exhibited at Le Bal and the Arab World Institute in Paris, Les Rencontres d’Arles, MUDAM Luxembourg and at the FOAM Museum in Amsterdam among others. Between 2017 and 2019, he led the Bilateral project between France and Italy, the book of which was published by Poursuite Editions in 2023. He is a regular collaborator as a photographer for Le Monde, notably in Libya and Ukraine.

Project

Welcome Europa

Welcome Europa aims to document the journeys of women and men through areas of relegation in the Balkans and the Mediterranean. Focusing on border crossings into the European Union and compiling portraits for the last 15 years and revealing solidarity initiatives, Samuel Gratacap’s goal is to describe the violence and hardship of these journeys and show how civil society can react by offering concrete solutions in terms of hospitality and sometimes vital assistance to people in exile.

Samuel Gratacap aims to pursue this work by extending it to the western Balkans as he builds a visual story about migration and solidarity with people in exile on both routes-the busiest to enter Europe. At a time when Russian aggression has led Ukraine to ask for its membership of the European Union to be accelerated, western Balkan countries are also requesting for a reappraisal of their respective applications be in light of this context of war.

Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Albania and Northern Macedonia are transit countries for migration to the EU. As such, they have been part of a European border outsourcing strategy since 2016. Their membership prospects depend on their ability to regulate or halt migratory flows. The western Balkans migration route into the EU was the most travelled in 2022, with 145,600 entries recorded in the six countries, an increase of 136% compared to 2021. During the period January to August 2023, it was the second most active route with more than 70,550 detections. Increased migratory pressure on this route could persist in the coming months.

For more than 20 years, migration policies in Europe have not been able to deal with this persistent problem with a sustainable vision. Samuel Gratacap also aims to represent means of coercion by creating a kind of photographic repertoire of the abject, bearing witness to changes in the landscape for the sake “border protection”. Lastly, he will continue to focus on solidarity, with those who fight and mobilise wherever they live, as if to counterbalance the violence: when exile meets hospitality.