WINNERS
1ST EDITION

RANDA MIRZA – Grant to a photographer from a Southern territory (Africa, Caribbean, South East Asia, Latin America, Middle East)

KATEL DELIA – Grant dedicated to a French photographer or a photographer living in France

ALAA MANSOUR – Grant dedicated to a woman photographer of any nationality

Each grant of 5.000€ is given directly to the photographer for the realization of her work. The photographer and her editor will have a period of 18 months to complete the project, finalized by the actual publication of the book. This program is supported by the Saif and the Ministry of Culture.

RANDA MIRZA "BEIRUTOPIA"

Winner Grant dedicated to a photographer from a southern territory

© Randa Mirza “Beirut is back and it is beautifull”

© Randa Mirza “pink room”

Born in Lebanon, 1978. Lives and works between Beirut and Marseille. A protean artist, Randa Mirza works mainly with photography and video. Her practice, anchored in a decolonial discourse, deals with the notion of identity and seeks to deconstruct and question normalized, gendered and orientalizing representations by making visible current symbolic, social and political constructions. Through his work, Mirza attempts to give voice to the unrepresented by questioning the nature of images and their social uses. His work has received several awards, including the Jeux de la Francophonie Award (2005), the Maison Blanche Photography Award (2013) and the No Limit Award at the Rencontres d’Arles 2006 and the Polyptych Award 2022.

BEIRUTOPIA is a visual essay on the socio-political and urban transformation of Beirut, the different phases of brutal change of this capital city since the civil war, and its multiple faces and stories. This first biographical monograph by Lebanese photographer Randa Mirza brings together several photographic works begun in the early 2000s and spans two decades.

This project will be published by Le Bec en l’air.

KATEL DELIA "MALTA - TUNIS - MARSEILLE"

Grant to a French photographer or a photographer living in France

© Katel Delia “Malta – Tunis – Marseille”

© Katel Delia “Malta – Tunis – Marseille”

Born in 1975, Katel Delia lives between Malta and Paris. She creates installations mixing photography, sculpture, sound and writing. She is interested in the traces of the past as they are reflected in the present, particularly in the context of migration. She was awarded the CAP Prize in 2021, a prize for contemporary African photography. In Malta, she had two solo exhibitions at the Spazju Kreattiv art center, then in a private gallery. His work has been presented in various photo festivals and group exhibitions in France, Malta and Switzerland and soon at the 13th Festival Circulation(s) in Paris.

Maltese immigration to North Africa, and then largely to France after the independence of Tunisia and Algeria, is little known, even in Malta. However, it is indeed a massive immigration on the scale of this small country. All immigrants are unique, but they all have in common the attachment to a territory and very often the wounds linked to what they have to leave. A country can be one day the one that welcomes and then decades later the one you have to leave for various reasons and vice versa. Being aware of this helps us to have more empathy for the people who are fleeing their countries.

This project will be published by Images Plurielles

ALAA MANSOUR "AÏNATA"

Winner Grant dedicated to a woman photographer

© Alaa Mansour “Aïnata”

© Alaa Mansour “Aïnata”

Born in Kinshasa (DRC) in 1989. Lives and works in Beirut. Alaa Mansour is a Lebanese artist, filmmaker and archivist. His work examines the history of violence and the power of images in the age of necropolitics.

“Aïnata is a place, the village of my parents, and the territory of my childhood located in southern Lebanon. Aïnata is the story of 25 years of Israeli occupation and multiple wars and offensives. It is also the story of multiple resistances and of a dream of liberation. Aïnata is initially a film project realized with two hands between the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012 and is part of a history of occupation, resistance, wars and transnational struggles that never cease to generate unfulfilled memories. It is not a matter of making a book about the film, but of extending the very space of the film to the book. Like a rhizome, it is a question of mapping within the book the different strata – visual and textual – that make up the body of Aïnata, to give an account of the multiplicity of forms of memory and discourse of and on History.

This project will be published by Macaroni Books.