19th Annual Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest People
En mutation_image 08

DANIEL 72 years old Arrived in 2010 Rue Hardouin Mansart Apartment type T1 Daniel is a very active volunteer at the neighborhood social center and other associations in the city. It is thanks to its fighting spirit that the town hall mobilized to build the pétanque court in the neighborhood. That's because we photographed him as if he were a king or a mayor, with his petanque bowls. When he was a child, the public assistance took Daniel away from his mother. He was placed at a very young age with a foster family. Seven years ago, one of his adopted sisters tracked him down through social media. She offers him a bottle of champagne to celebrate their reunion. Daniel doesn't drink alcohol, he prefers to keep it by promising to open it at the neighborhood Social Center to celebrate his departure. SERIES STATEMENT OF INTENT ‘En Mutation’ – ‘Changing’ – is a photo and video project which goes to the heart of urban transformation in the Bourgogne neighbourhood of Tourcoing. Freeing this neighbourhood from the spotlight of local urban policy by transforming the area qualitatively is the objective of the project. Spread over 15 years the current development plan affects the daily lives of 7,000 inhabitants and as part of the New National Urban Renovation Programme is the largest urban renewal site in France. Offering housing, public spaces and ‘more attractive’ services, it is now in the phase of demolition of the existing building stock, which consists mainly of terraced housing and tower blocks, and rehousing hundreds of families. ‘Changing’ seeks to investigate the intimate space of this mutation by meeting six residents and their families who are affected by immediate or imminent removal. This project records their feelings and proposes to create a paradigm trace of their presence before the memory is definitively erased. Changing where they live is akin to a change of skin, the molt of the snake: the imprint that remains are these symbolic images emerging from their words. At the crossroads of photographic scene-setting and reporting, this work is the fruit of several meetings from which the recorded sound, remixed and transformed into a polyphonic sound track, accompanies the video, filmed by a drone, of the demolition of one of the buildings. This series presents images of the residents and different extracts from the meetings.

Photo Detail
Date Taken: 06.2021
Date Uploaded: 11.2021
Photo Location: Tourcoing, France
Camera: Canon EOS 5D Mark IV
Copyright: © rossella piccinno