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Behind Closed Doors – Beirut (LBN)

Behind Closed Doors is a serie of photo essays by nine syrian women during a one-week participatory photography workshop by Jungleye Association in Bourj el Barajneh camp in Beirut. As an urban refugee camp Burj el Barajneh looks and functions more like a ghetto than a camp. For security reasons, it wasn’t possible for the women to take pictures outside, or even walk within the area holding a camera. As a result of this limitation and because of the subject matter the women proposed, Jungleye quickly decided to do the workshop behind closed doors, meaning the women would focus their reportage on what happened with the confines of their home. 

“Behind Closed Doors” photo essay is an intimate and deeply moving testimony about these women’s lives documenting what it means to flee Syria and find refuge in Lebanon. Each of them focused on various topics and issues they are facing everyday, such as: health problems, lack of access to education for their children, sanitation conditions, security problems, and unemployment. As these strong women share their emotions and their private lives since they had to flee from Syria, they help spread the word about the situation of millions of Syrians in Lebanon. 

In a stunning display of openness, the women shared their emotions and their private life during the workshop and as a result, the women developed a close bond with one another. The images of home life and children seen through iron window grills and ghosted behind scrim like curtains remind the viewer what is still at stake in their daily struggle. 

Ici d’ailleurs

At the heart of the second confinement in France, the Jungleye association and photographer Séverine Sajous have set up a cultural activity for residents of « La Maison des Réfugiés » and the Jourdan emergency accommodation center in Paris.

CHU Jourdan welcomes, guides and shelters homeless people, isolated men and women, and exiled families from Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia. A total of 280 people live here, including 135 children.
« La Maison des Réfugiés », located on the first floor of the CHU Jourdan hospital, is a place open to everyone, from asylum seekers to Paris residents, committed citizens or those seeking solidarity, and associations and institutions specialized in or confronted with the issue of migration. The organization’s vocation is to network individual and collective initiatives to promote all cultures and encourage encounters.

Affected by restrictions due to the pandemic, the « Maison des Réfugiés » is at a standstill, activities have been interrupted since the start of the pandemic and spaces are empty. Jungleye having been granted exceptional access, the « Ici, d’Ailleurs » project is the first cultural activity organized since March 2020.

CONCEPT

The pandemic and the confinement imposed on everyone reduce social interaction, distance us from our loved ones and prevent us from moving and living freely. This exceptional situation makes us aware of the reality of exiles, undocumented migrants and asylum seekers, who are forced daily to live far from home (geographically, socially and in terms of family), with their movements restricted and controlled.
Faced with the permanent impossibility for exiles to be with their loved ones, the « Ici, d’Ailleurs » project suggests a « family reunion » around the creation of postcards.

Through the question: « Where would you go if you could get out of your 4 walls? », residents reconnect with places, with their landmarks and with the people they’ve left behind.
A photo studio set against a Chroma backdrop is an invitation to escape, allowing those who wish to join their loved ones for the time of a photo. Photographer Séverine Sajous (co-founder of the association) also takes portraits in situ, in the privacy of participants, which are then integrated into archive photos taken from their cell phones or memory drawers.

The use of archival photos and contemporary portraits brings together two intimate realities, providing valuable insights into the identities and feelings of people who are often overlooked in our society.
The creation of a pantone based on images of the Covid-19 molecule underlines the context, reframing and even framing the image and imagination we have of migrants and undocumented migrants.

RESULTS & IMPACT

The manipulation of images is intended to generate critical thinking in the service of solidarity with these people, who are often « stared down » by the media. At a time when the pandemic is leading us to experience moments of introspection, these testimonies mark an emotional pause that helps us to reflect on the experiences of people in exile or on the margins of society.

A total of 17 postcards will be produced, each a unique object, complete with words written by the participants for their loved ones. They will all be sent to their recipients, either by post or via social networks.
This moment of sharing had a strong positive impact on the participants as well as on their loved ones, the recipients of the postcards. The project also brought culture back to La Maison des réfugiés, which reopened its premises for yoga and sewing workshops following the success of this initiative.

INTERNATIONAL MIGRANTS’ DAY

December 18 is International Migrants Day. To mark the occasion, 1,750 copies of the 17 postcards produced during the workshop were printed by EMMAÜS Solidarité, the NGO behind the « Refugee House » project. Hundreds of postcards were sent to Parisians and local elected officials as a means of raising awareness and starting a dialogue on how to guarantee a dignified welcome for exiles.
Echoing this initiative, we exhibited these 17 unique large-format postcards in the streets of Marseille and Nantes. The billboards became a support for this free, self-produced exhibition, in the eyes of many passers-by. In these times of pandemics, when culture becomes inaccessible, we confront the closure of museums, exhibition halls and all cultural venues by appropriating public space and bringing culture to the streets.

I wish I were here

Activity Studio photo done in collaboration with Studio Public.

A quick, fun way to create an interactive photography project, in which participants transport themselves to their chosen destination.

« I wish I were here »

  • Start with a brainstorming session. Ask: Where would you like to be right now? Participants work in pairs, taking turns to ask each other where they would like to be, and a mental image of that place. After a few minutes, ask them to share their answers with the group so they can start to get to know each other
  • Set up a green chroma key screen, ask participants take photographs of each other
  • Working on laptops, search the internet for images of the chosen destinations, to use as a background
  • With some quick, basic, post-production, participants can insert themselves into the background
  • Use a digital printer to print the results, and the postcards are complete
  • Discuss what the images make them feel, what they imagined Europe would be like, and how that compares with the reality

 » A reunión »

  • Participants magically “reunite” with family and friends. On their mobile phones, participants ask family and friends to send them a photo of themselves right now. Perhaps they are eating, driving, working, visiting…
  • Using the green screen, the refugees take a photograph of themselves.
  • The two photographs are “merged” so that the refugees are “reunited” with their loved ones.
  • Once the images are ready, participants can send the edited image back home. The images can be used to talk about how it feels to be separated, about loneliness, friendship, family, etc.

The exercises are fun and the results are fast and impressive. They introduce participants to the whole process of a participatory photography project, from planning and brainstorming to production and exhibition/circulation of the results.

The postcard format is a way of starting discussions about different kinds of images and different kinds of travel: tourism, migration, forced displacement etc. These postcard icebreakers are a non-intimidating way to start talking about their dreams and experiences, about how they see themselves, about loneliness and connection, etc.

The use of the green chroma key screen is a way of leaving the physical space where the workshop is held: like Aladdin’s magic carpet, it allows participants to travel to other times and places, a different space-time dimension. The use of the green screen is also linked to film and video industry productions, destigmatising the impersonal, objectified image of refugees presented by the media and photojournalism, and allowing people to recreate their own personal stories and identity.

SameSame – Series

SameSame is a correspondence between refugees from different countries and refugee camps.
Using the Jungleye postcards, refugees and asylum seekers write each other as a way to broaden the dialogue. This activity is also a way to discover Jungleye postcards, to understand their process of production and their meaning. At the end, a link is created between people, living in different places but experiencing the same difficulties.
To participate in this activity, there are three possible ways to engage and broaden the dialog:

  • Choose a favorite postcard made by an unknown person living in a refugee camp
  • Write a note on the back of the postcard to the photographer/author of it. Jungleye will take responsibility to send the postcard to the photographer/author
  • Re-create and re-photograph the same image in a new environment
  • We will send back your new postcard to the first photographer
  • A network between refugees is starting

Eleousa

Habibi is a Spanish association founded in March 2016. Shortly thereafter they established the Habibi Center as an alternative learning center for Yazidi refugee children, with the aim to develop the children’s learning skills in communication, languages, art, culture, computing, cuisine. The second aim of the center was to help protect the Yazidi children, who, as a historically persecuted minority, were finding it difficult to integrate with the other refugee children. Since the center is located two kilometers away from the Yazidi refugee camp of Eleousa, children walk from the camp to the Habibi center everyday, spending the whole day with the teachers and volunteers.

Jungleye conducted a photography class for children between 9 and 14 years old, inviting them to express their feelings in front of the camera. The class built a photo booth complete with a light studio. Working closely with the English teacher, the students would begin the day by shooting a self-portrait expressing their mood. Then, using various software, the daily photo would become the basis of a digital collage the children would work on in the computer class.
In addition to basic English, computer and photographic skills, this daily photographic activity taught the children socio-emotional skills such as empathy for one another and how to express their emotions better. The daily photograph also helped volunteers understand the effect the inability to commingle in the camps had had on the Yazidi children and the volunteers were able to reach out to the more vulnerable children who were suffering from isolation and loneliness.

On The Road – Postcards

On the Road postcards are a retrospective of the migratory route produced by the displaced communities themselves.
An activity that allows participants to share stories of their journeys, and to start thinking about the potential of combining words and images.

  • Participants go through the photos in their phones and pick one out from their journey.
  • Each person in the group talks about their photograph, and why they have chosen it.
  • After discussing their stories, each participant writes a caption that expresses what the image means to him or her.
  • The photos are printed out with the captions and shared.

PariScape (FR)

Pariscape is a panorama of travelers’eyes. Migrants hosted in a humanitarian center in Ivry and tourists met during photographic walks, driven by an equal desire for discovery. The relationships thus formed, around the key places of culture or mythical monuments, secure people in exile and gives them the right to curiosity and the pleasure of the meeting.

PariScape is a horizontal experience where refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, visitors and tourists place themselves at the same level of discoveries of cultures and knowledge. The simplicity of the process makes spontaneous and rich encounters.

The discovery of the territory, the places of life or history, the urban walk thus documented create a relational field between visitors and inhabitants, and between inhabitants themselves.

We then touch on the heritage of migration: a heritage made of exchanges and testimonies crossed. The fraternity is expressed around culture and discovery, in laughter and mutual astonishment. We also approach the imaginary of the trip. A new landscape is unfolding, forms of existence that allow the uprooted to repeat, despite the pain of the path of exile, cultural habits in a « different space ».

Thanks to the postcards made during a one – week photographic workshop, the images of Murad, Ruta, Abdu, Zerabruk, Fawad, Khadim Ullah, Mesmin, will travel in their turn, taking the eyes and the link between beings.

This PariScape project was realized in collaboration with Jungleye, Emmaus Solidarity, The Pompidou Center.

Burj El Barajneh

Many Syrian families are living in the south of Beirut in the Palestinian refugee camp of Burj el Barajneh settled in 1948. The particular workshop was significant both because it was the first time Jungleye did a workshop in an urban context and because it was the first workshop conducted exclusively with women. As an urban refugee camp Burj el Barajneh looks and functions more like a ghetto than a camp. For security reasons, it wasn’t possible for the women to take pictures outside, or even walk within the area holding a camera. As a result of this limitation and because of the subject matter the women proposed, Jungleye quickly decided to do the workshop behind closed doors, meaning the women would focus their reportage on what happened with the confines of their home. In addition, the women decided to also do a reportage on each other.
The nine women; Nuzha, Ghazia, Khawal, Aicha, Safaa, Hayfa, Seba, Farida and Wazira, came to the Jungleye class everyday and did their own photo essay. Unlike other Jungleye projects, where the work is collaborative, each reportage in Burj el Barajneh was created by only one photographer and delved deeply into the realm of the personal. In a stunning display of openness, the women shared their emotions and their private life during the workshop and as a result, the women developed close bond with one another and the Jungleye team. “Behind Closed Doors” photo essay is an intimate and deeply moving testimony about these women’s lives documenting what it means to flee Syria and find refuge in Lebanon. The images of home life and children seen through iron window grills and ghosted behind scrim like curtains remind the viewer what is still at stake in their daily struggle. As these strong women share their emotions and their private lives they help spread the word about the situation of millions of Syrians in Lebanon.

Mashghara – Bekaa Valley (LBN)

Lebanon hosts more than 1.5 million of Syrian refugees in a country of 4 million people. Refugee camps in the Bekaa Valley are informal and scattered in between wide agricultural fields where displaced persons can work only during summer in exchange for a small amount of money to live. These settlements appeared in 2011, at the beginning of the Syrian crisis.

The Jungleye workshop occurred in a small camp located in Kherbet Kanafar, next to Joub Jannine. For the last four years, around 150 people have been living in this camp, including 30 men, 20 women, and 80 to 90 kids under 18 years old. All of them are coming from the region of Jabal Alzawyé, in Syria.

This was Jungleye’s first workshop exclusively for children. The particpants were 9 to 14 years old and included 12 boys (Abdu, Abdo, Abdelaziz, Adham, Akram, Awad, Bahaa, Bassam, Hamdo, Ibrahim, Ali, Salah) and 3 girls (Hiba, Safah and Amni). In the camp, children do not have access to basic education, so the organizing a photography workshop was a way to teach them team work and, even for a short time, to give them a chance to learn and to express their ideas, emotions and imagination. In contrary with refugee camps in Europe, refugees in Lebanon are not used of occidental volunteers. For many refugees, the workshop was the first time they could openly express themselves and tell their personal history. The main topics the refugees wanted to talk about were water, education and lack of access to UN aid. Since the camp is an informal settlement, it cannot be registered with the UN (a registration issue since 2015), and, subsequently cannot receive UN aid.

On the first day of the workshop, the municipality stopped the water channels providing water to the camp and as a result, the children quickly agreed to focus their work on the water issue. The young photographers went to work, documenting the issue from every side, examining the source of water, water channels, water in the camp, water in the shelter, water in their daily life, water in the fields, and the impact of water on their health. By the end of the workshop, the children had created two photo essays. The first focused on their living condition in the camp regarding water supply and the second portrayed refugee workers in agricultural fields.

In addition to teaching the children, Jungleye created some writing exercises for the adults to learn to help the children practice their language skills, who, due to circumstances had not been to school since they were 4 years old and did not yet know how to write.

Katsikas refugee camp (GR)

As a result of the agreement between the European Union and Turkey regarding refugee care, the military camp of Katsikas opened on the 17th of March 2016. Since this date it has been hosting the same families in 200 tents : 750 persons sent there from Kyos Island, including roughly equal numbers of men, women and children. Syrians make up the majority, but 20% of them are either Afghani or Iraqi. In this quiet camp, far away from big cities and basic services, people are bored and tired of waiting. Often surprised by the living conditions, they wait for months, spending their days waiting for the UN to come and send them to their desired destinations so that they can finally begin a new life.

Jungleye Katsikas workshop focused on how to make a good reportage, and included writing and drawing activities such as self-presentation, mapping the journey, and interviews to understand what was important for them to report and to claim. Participants and workshop leaders discussed the entire process of a photography reportage, from things such as how to choose a topic, to editing the pictures and the chronology of their reportage.

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