Seine Pandemie

Analogue reportage (Mars to December 2020) about the pandemic in the poorest district of France.

In December 2019 I moved to Aubervilliers, a satellite city of Paris in the Seine-Saint-Denis district. After a few months France also has been affected by the pandemic and we all found ourselves in lockdown. The neighborhood suddenly got busy. Here the population density is the higher of the country, staying at home, for large families, becomes impossible, and so people starts gathering in public spaces. Meanwhile, the working class of the region, who cover essential services, continues to move to Paris. But the public transport have been reduced. The situation creates crowding in wagons and stations. It is easy to understand why at the end of March this became the district the most affected by Covid 19. My photographic work, flanked by the journalist Giacomo Leso and the sociologist Federico Filetti, start to research the reasons of the high number of contagious in the socio-economic factor of the region.
With the arrival of spring, day after day, a camp of about 2000 refugees is born. The tent city, composed of both Asians (Banladesh, Pakistan and above all Afghanistan) and Africans (Mali, Sudan, Ghana, Nigeria and the Horn of Africa) occupies the banks of the Saint Denis canal for over two months. After its eviction, not far away, another one was born that reached the number of 4,000 refugees, including women and children. Also in this case the Covid 19 protocol is not fully respected, with the risk of creating a huge cluster. The migrants were helped by local NGOs, which offer them at least one meal a day, tents and medical assistance. The associations denounce the negligence of the government which, in order to getting out of the pandemic, should take care of guaranteeing a worthy condition to asylum seekers and other migrants occupying the camps.