Life in Shadows Port – Streets of the World (2015–16)

In this photographic body of work, Ferrari turns documentary photography into performance as collaboration. The subjects of these photos are a group of migrants from Senegal who have settled in a seemingly nondescript town in northern Catalunya, close to the French border.

The series is taken at night in the streets of Port de la Selva. The subjects enact for the camera a reinterpretation of their experiences of crossing Africa and migrating to Europe. This approach is not a classic documentary representation or interpretation of the migration crisis. Instead each subject enacts a posture or ritual, having chosen an object important to them or which is related to their journey. The subjects await documentation or deportation, caught in a twilight of ambiguity between the light regimes of night and day. These images portray the often-hidden nature of the traumatic impact of the rupture of migration and the assumption of new identities. Jean McNeil. 2016

In collaboration with Bouba Diedhiou. 2015