9 DAYS AND A LIFE
ISABELLE FERREIRAWith the support of DRAC IDF and Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian
Extract from the text of the curator of the exhibition Sonia Recasens : "La frontière nous a traversé.e.s"
For her solo exhibition at Maubert Gallery,
9 days and one life, Isabelle Ferreira pays tribute to forgotten pilgrims of O salto. The great leap, beyond the boundaries, made by thousands of Portuguese migrants in the 60s, in order to escape from the dictatorship, the misery and the colonial wars. 20 000 in 1958, Portuguese are more than 750 000 in 1975, living and working in France. A great leap done under a tense political climate of hiding with the repression by the dictator Salazar who refuses and even forbids the emigration to France in 1955. On the other side, France with high economic growth, strongly demanding for a low-paid working force in order to reconstruct the country. And in the middle, networks of smugglers who organize the journey of thousands of men first, then women and children, through the Pyrenees under all weathers, on foot, by car, piled up in cattle trucks, housed in barns, and under Salazarist and Francoist police threats. Between archeology and the autopsy of a territory, Isabelle Ferreira searches the bowels of this landscape crossed by men and women at the risk of their lives (...).