This project emerged on November 2010 when I gave birth to an American baby. I was born in France and had never really questioned my belonging to a territory, to a culture, to a country, neither the possibility of creating new roots elsewhere.
In 2015 I became an American citizen while millions of people where crossing borders everywhere on the planet, in hope of a better life.
In 2016 my country of adoption made a disturbing political choice which urged me to react.
In early 2017, I visited the abandoned hospital of Ellis Island and it all came together: the notion of migration, the necessity to question our pasts and our political institutions, the urgency to dare to think.
Between 2017 and 2018, I took more than 50 anonymous photographers to the abandoned hospital of Ellis Island and asked them to search and share the history of their family's migration. Together, we made a book that we hope to offer to all Public Libraries throughout the US.
I hope the images and words of this collective project will inspire our generation and the next to embrace the perpetual movement of migration and reinvent our social structures around it.
Figures in the images come from the archive of the Ellis Island Conservancy and collaged by French activist JR.