Leros, île au coeur de la crise migratoire

Leros, île au coeur de la crise migratoire « Leros, île au coeur de la crise migratoire » is a project that was held between November and December 2015. Leros is an island of 74 km2 located in the Greek Mediterranean area, a few kilometers from the Turkish coast. 35,000 refugees have transited in 2015 through this small piece of land. Nevertheless, Leros is not only a transitory land in the middle of nowhere. It is an island with a heavy history, known for being a strategic position in the Second World War, for being the destination of deportation of political dissidents during the Regime of the Colonels and for hosting one of the most inhuman mental hospital in the world, which has been closed in 1995. Leros is still bearing the scars of history. Today, in the area of the old mental hospital, Greek authorities built a “hotspot” supposedly to centralize, control and detain migrants and refugees fleeing war. This place is converting in a detention camp, isolated in the middle of the sea. The book "Leros, île au coeur de la crise migratoire" is divided in two parts: the texts of the journalist Laure Gabus and the continuous sequence of photographs of Pierre-Emmanuel Fehr. The images are a combination of the refugee camp life, the island and the ruins of the old mental hospital, in an effort to combine past and present of Leros, which are dramatically overlapping.