Fotolimo: A Festival that Borders on all Images Fotolimo, un festival qui fait frontière de toutes images

Teacher at the École Nationale Supérieure of Photography of Arles from 1989 to 2016. Christian Gattinoni has been practicing writing and photography since the mid-1970s. He works as an art critic— member of the International Association of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA)—mainly interested in the relationship between photography, other arts and human sciences whose common denominator remains the body. He shares his time between art criticism, curating exhibitions, and image pedagogy. Borders in Globalization Review Volume 3, Issue 1 (Fall/Winter 2021): 128-136 ttps://doi.org/10.18357/bigr31202120449

In this BIG_Review exclusive for the sepcial section Art & Borders, Christian Gattinoni highlights a conference given during the FOTOLIMO festival. Located on the French-Catalan border, the festival boasts "the mission to add energy to reflect on the concept of border through the image, in a critical cross-border perspective".

In English
En français

Introduction
Combining the term Foto, spelt more universally without the English or French "ph", and the term limo meaning "the limit", the creators of the Fotolimo festival span both sides of the French-Spanish border in the Pyrenean region, between Cerbère and Portbou. The first edition was founded in 2016 as a joint initiative between three associations in the Languedoc-Roussillon-Midi-Pyrénées region: the Lumière d'Encre association in the town of Céret, Negpos in Nîmes, and Phot'oeil in Talairan. The first two will continue alone in the second year.
If the border is defined as a geographical and territorial space where one swings from one side to the other, from one state to another, the people in charge of the festival want to approach it as "this territory of transgression, this immense place of sensitive and aesthetic potentiality. This open stage where innumerable scenarios can take place". In an even more positive way they envisage it, far from the English terms "boundary" or "border" which accentuate its character of limit, but as an interface, as a place producing exchanges. Wandering, nomadism, pilgrimage, invasion, exile, and colonization have constituted the history of humanity into a history of migration. The political, ideological, and artistic stakes involved justify the urgency they feel to make a frontier, which originally entailed going into battle to fight and defend oneself. Photography and other contemporary art forms serve as the weapons for those participating in Fotolima. This essay briefly illustrates these themes with glimpses of the diverse works showcased at the festival's premier event.
The Physical Limits of the Border
Borders in Globalization Review | Volume 3 | Issue 1 | Fall/Winter 2021 Gattinoni, "Fotolimo, un festival qui fait frontière de toutes images" _R migrants, Moroccans, and Spaniards seem to be blocked. The author disowns the situation as follows: In these places, consumerism is pushed to its caricature. Questionable financial products, tax havens, speculative bubbles, controversial diplomatic relations, more or less legal trafficking have made and still make the wealth of these territories. In atmospheric black and white shots, intimate spaces, places of passage and thresholds organize centrifugal visions.
Daphne Le Sergent created in 2010 an eight-minute video: 24 clichés que j'ai occupés (24 Pictures I Took) [ Figure 2]. They were collected in the south of Spain, in the region of Almeria. "El mare del plastico" is made up of 17,000 hectares of greenhouse crops whose spectacular development is based on the overexploitation of immigrant labor. Black and white photos are superimposed with color-video inlays. Each one is introduced by simple actions: arriving, phoning, walking, waiting, getting off, living, working, looking. The notion of border is materialized by the juxtaposition of the fixed image and the moving image of the same place in the same space.

The Issue of Migration
Je suis pas mort je suis là (I am not Dead I am Here) was produced by Laetitia Tura during stays in Morocco and Tunisia to meet migrants who shared their experiences of migratory journey.
For these migrants to Italy another stage is the Greek port city of Patras, here studied by Stephanos Mangriotis in Europa Inch Allah (Europe Godwilling) [ Figure 3].
For Les traverses (The Crossbars) Aglaé Bory brings together two sets: Mers intérieures (Inland Seas) which aligns men and women with their backs to the sea, and Les invisibles (The Invisibles), which reveals their faces [ Figure 4]. In the same way, the most sensitive images of Border Line by Richard Petit [ Figure 5], produced during his residency at Lumière d'encre, are these deliberately blurred alignments of male bodies that  Maxime Taillez, ayant vécu dans le Nord de la France a beaucoup pratiqué les allers-retours vers la Belgique jusqu'à faire ses études à l'école de photographie « le 75 » à Bruxelles. Il scrute les no-man's lands autour des anciens postes de douane entre les deux pays en recherche des faits de tourisme dans les zones commerciales hors taxes. Il dénonce ainsi l'aléatoire de la frontière.
Borders in Globalization Review | Volume 3 | Issue 1 | Fall/Winter 2021 Gattinoni, "Fotolimo: A Festival that Borders on all Images" _R make us aware of all the migrants who disappear from our daily screens while trying to cross borders at the risk of their lives. At the edge of the shore or in the depths of the forest, the ghostly views of these shipwrecked people are deeply moving, between fact and fiction.
Jacqueline Salmon produced Le hangar (The Warehouse) on the accommodation sites of Sangatte. Following Paul Virilio's book Chambres précaires (Precarious Rooms) from "Samu social" in Paris. She testifies to the living conditions of migrants by using only the materials available to them: UN camp style tents, algeco shelters, folding beds, khaki blankets, and mixtures of government-issued civilian and military fabrics. Conversely, Thierry Dana for his series El Hogar (Home) shows the daily needs of an Afghan refugee family at last appeased in Geneva.
In a more experimental way, Francesca di Bonito studies these Migrations [ Figure 6] through the biological cycles of the living bodies and the displacements of population as social bodies which are thus caught in the same movement.
Ronny Trocker produced his animated film Estate based on the famous photo by Juan Medina showing an African emigrant emerging from the water exhausted and walking on all fours on a beach where indifferent tourists are lounging. The cliché published in the press finds a second life which accentuates its scandalous character.

La question des migrations
Je suis pas mort je suis là a été produit par Laetitia Tura lors de séjours au Maroc et en Tunisie à la rencontre de migrants qui partagent leur expérience migratoire.
[ Figure 4] De même les images les plus sensibles de Border Line de Richard Petit, [ Figure 5] réalisées en résidence à Lumière d'Encre, sont ces alignements volontairement flous de corps masculins qui nous sensibilisent à tous ces migrants qui disparaissent de nos écrans quotidiens en tentant au risque de leur vie de franchir les frontières. Au bord du rivage ou dans les profondeurs de la forêt, les vues fantômes de ces naufragés sont bouleversantes, entre document et fiction. The dream of a Europe that will never be as beautiful, as welcoming, as rich as seen from the other side".

Communities
Not wanting to be satisfied with the sole question of migrants, the people in charge of the festival open their concerns to the definition in images of different communities. Hence various returns on recent history.
In order to give an account of this lost territory that East Germany has become, Leila Danerol has equipped herself with an old medium format silver camera "made in USSR".
[ Figure 8]. This contemporary tool of the historical situation that ended in 1990 allows her to visually render the traces of this disappeared territory.
Anne Leroy focuses on Abkhazia, an independent territory since 1992 that stretches from the shores of the Black Sea to the mountains of the "Great Caucasus" and shares border areas with Russia and Georgia.
Anna Puig Rosado, a descendant of Jewish grandparents from Odessa and Istanbul, says she has observed Israel from Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. For Escape, Tel Aviv she focuses on the walls, their posters and slogans.
Two creators give an unclichéd version of the Traveler community. First, Hortense Soichet created Esperem by initiating gypsy women from the Carcassonne region to photography over several years. These workshops organized by the GRAPh have resulted in an edition and a traveling exhibition. Then, the Catalan Neus Sola shows with Dolls the daily life of young gypsies. In 2020 she joined the Fotolimo organization with her aladeriva lab that she runs with David

Communautés
Ne voulant se contenter de la seule question des migrants, les responsables du festival ouvrent leurs préoccupations Borders in Globalization Review | Volume 3 | Issue 1 | Fall/Winter 2021 Gattinoni, "Fotolimo: A Festival that Borders on all Images" _R Del Campo. Following studies in humanities, art, and image therapy, she engages in participatory photography projects.
David del Campo bears witness to the pre-Islamic Yazidi minority refugees in Kurdistan. On August 3, 2014, the Islamic State committed the last of 74 genocides against this community. He photographed their modest tents where they inscribed 3/8 in memory of these facts and the smartphone screenshots where they inform their families about their precariousness on social networks and get informed in return. The Cubans, Yuri Obregon Batard in a serial approach raises the signs of Cubanity in all its excesses, and Alejandro Pérez Alvarez works in a color documentary vein. In his series El Silencio del Cuerpo (The Silence of the Body), he invites us to discover with modesty and respectful distance the world of transgenders in Cuba [ Figure 9]. As for Yomer Montejo Harrys, he uses X-rays to illustrate some of the thorniest issues of this society in Havana, which has many problems including: the desire to leave, prostitution, and bureaucracy. The Chilean Carla Yovane Pérez gives a personal vision, soft and intimate, of Chilean male prostitutes.

The Borders of Gender
As for the canons of femininity, they are staged by Noncedo Gxekwa from Johannesburg. She claims a distanced studio aesthetic close to fashion, while another Chilean, Zaida González Ríos, mixes in her self-staging the cycles of life and death, realism and mysticism, colorization and kitsch, in the service of a very virulent social criticism, in a provocative and liberating outrage that challenges the clichés of femininity. The French Fabien Dupoux takes advantage of a Chinese opera he observed in Laos in 2015 to show how open can be the Southeast Asian societies towards homosexuality and trans-identity.

Conceptualization
The first round table in 2017 brought together Gregory Tuban, a geographer who looks back at the borders of the Third Republic, a historian, Guillaume Lacquement, who looks back at the geography of the inter-German border [ Figure 10] and Mathilde Pette, a sociologist who comments on contemporary migratory flows from à la définition en images de différentes communautés. D'où divers retours sur l'histoire récente.
Deux créatrices donnent une version non clichée de la communauté des gens du voyage. Hortense Soichet a créé Esperem en initiant sur plusieurs années des femmes gitanes de la région de Carcassonne à la photographie. Ces workshops organisés par le GRAPh ont abouti à une édition et à une exposition itinérante  Benchetrit photographs the posters of architectural projects to duplicate L'épiderme de la ville (The Epidermis of the City). Salvatore Puglia reactivates a letter of Hölderlin in a photo-text series that manages his Transit in a photographic road-movie. Caitriona Dunnett treats the border with the archaic process of the cyanotype that makes the Irish Mass Paths more present. Francesca di Bonito exhibits her reliquaries made from anonymous web archives embedded in shells. The performative practice of the Chinese artist Ning Zuohong sees him proceeding to the installation of a red thread as a symbolic link in the trans-border landscapes.  First of the residents, Laetitia Tura creates her series Notre affaire est de passer en traçant des chemins sur la mer (Our Business is to Pass by Tracing Paths on the Sea) [ Figure  11]. The meeting of young survivors of the Open Arms, the SeaWatch, or the Salvamento, who arrived in Perpignan from Africa, gives the artist the opportunity to make the link with the families who fought against fascism during the Spanish war. In 1939, 450,000 people made their way to the Retirada. Philippe Dollo is also attached to Ce souvenir là (This Memory There) [ Figure 12] he exposes the archives of the maternity of Elne and the Spanish center of Cerbère which were refuges, places of solidarity, and mutual aid. Benjamin considers history from the reverse side of official history: that of the victims, the dominated, the catastrophes.
Today, when museums and places of culture are closed and the pandemic poses sanitary borders that are more restrictive than ever before in history, making borders with artworks is more necessary than ever. The people in charge of Fotolimo prepared with modesty but great resolution their edition for the fall of 2021.