The NGO SOS Méditerranée is organizing Escales solidaires, its first festival until January 7, 2025 in Paris and Seine-Saint-Denis, to mobilize a large audience to its cause. The association, created in 2015, comes to the aid of the many shipwrecked people in the central Mediterranean. It has already saved more than 40,000 lives on the most dangerous migration route in the world. But for this, he needs 24,000 euros per day and the broadest possible support.
2 mins
To make yourself known or remind citizens of your existence, the NGO offers a series of meetings. The first is an outdoor photo exhibition in the center of Paris. On the banks of the Seine, these photos recount ten years of sea rescue aboard theAquariusthenOcean Vikingthe association’s ships.
Around thirty photographers were at the origin. At the microphone of Marie Casadebaigfrom the France service of RFI, Jérémie Lusseau chooses to tell us his stories, gathered on the same panel: “ I wanted to ask, whether crew members or survivors, to entrust me with an object that was precious to them, and to tell me the story of this object. »
Johanna de Tessières, an independent Belgian photographer, takes us to the portrait she made of a little boy, Ali, 8 years old: “ It was alarming to see that an eight-year-old boy had already passed through Libyan jails, and that there he was making the crossing alone. »
More than 24,000 dead
Putting faces, names, stories on a tragedy which has already cost the lives of more than 24,000 people in the central Mediterranean is the common thread of this series of events. “ We wanted to systematically remind people that behind the numbers, behind the word “migrants”, there are children, women, men, explains Sabine Grenard, responsible for programming for SOS Méditerranée. When we are on board the boat, we have this awareness evident from the first approach. It’s not a group, it’s a person. »
This is how the plays, films and exhibitions were chosen, which will be offered until January 7, 2025 as part of these solidarity stops.