Ground floor of the Centre des Colloques, ground floor of Bâtiment Recherche Sud
19 June - 5 July

The exhibition Standing for Freedom emerges from the research-creation project Focus on scholars forced into exile yesterday and today (RESTRICA) designed by Pascale Laborier, professor at the Université Paris-Nanterre and the Institute for Social Sciences of Politics (ISP), and by Pierre-Jérôme Adjedj, photographer based in Berlin and co-founder of the creative agency Sur mesure.

Their approach aims to make academic exile visible and comprehensible without freezing this moment in the subjects’ trajectory. To achieve this, the creative process overlays elements to the photographed face that tell the person's story. These photos, representing the country of origin and the host country, along with personal objects or items related to their research field, are placed together and superimposed at the time of shooting, without subsequent photomontage, thus creating a unique visual palimpsest.

In partnership with the PAUSE program and Open Society Foundation, 55 portraits of exiled academics and those who welcomed them were created. The exhibition features 15 of these portraits(*). A catalog has been published in the scientific journal Mondes & Migrations (that will have a stand at the Civil Society forum), gathering most of the portraits and texts written in the first person by the photographed individuals.

Since its creation in March 2021 at the Cité du Design in Saint-Étienne, the exhibition has been presented 25 times in France, Germany, Belgium, Uruguay, and the USA (for more information, visit www.standingforfreedom.eu).

(*) Narrative cartographies linked to photographs are also published on the Géo-récits website. This "Understanding exile" project was created with support from the Institut Convergences Migrations: https://bit.ly/geo-recits