MISS WITHOUT PAPERS: Evangelia Kranioti

Evangelia Kranioti travels to Lebanon for the first time in 2015, just after having completed a series of photographs in the Moria refugee camp in Mytilene (island of Lesbos, Greece). In Beirut, her investigation on the fringes of a Mediterranean ravaged by the tragedy of exile leads her to discover an invisible micro-society: immigrant women from Filipino, Chinese, Ethiopian, or Sri Lankan communities, trapped in an opaque system of domestic servitude known as kafala. Once employed as maids, cooks, saleswomen, hairdressers, or masseuses, their visas and work permits are confiscated, making it impossible for them to move freely within or outside the country. Living under precarious conditions, they are particularly vulnerable to the abuses of this blatant and quasi-mafia-like form of slavery. In the eyes of the artist, who also studied law in Athens, these women under control become a block of reality from which she constructs a spellbinding visual narrative, guided by the intuition that the marked flesh of undocumented women echoes the wounds disfiguring the walls of the Lebanese megalopolis, damaged by decades of wars and crises.

Returning to Beirut in 2018 and again in 2019, Evangelia Kranioti decides to stage Darling, Sara, Kalkidan, and the others in an unprecedented photographic adventure, determined to place these marginalized women at the center of the frame. Taking advantage of their rare Sunday outings, she transforms them into Misses for a day (or rather for a night): “Miss Without Papers,” “Miss Immigration,” or “Miss Foreign Worker,” read the sashes created for the project by local artisans, reflecting the artist’s deliberately offbeat approach.

Often captured at dusk, when the pink sky becomes particularly unreal, the Mediterranean atmosphere disappears in favor of a science-fiction climate, as if the most popular neighborhoods of Beirut (Dora, Nabaa, Bourj Hammoud) had been transformed into imaginary, shimmering cities, anamorphic replicas of Manila or Addis Ababa. Neon lights and giant billboards cast an artificial green-fuchsia glow onto semi-abandoned buildings, deconstructing the architecture into a purely mental space. From what they have endured, these women have much to tell us, while remaining silent models who observe us. For in this contemporary avatar of Babel, everything can be said, even without words.

These somnambulistic “ladies for a night” wander through a city full of sound and fury, absurdity and violence. And while solitude is what first emerges from these portraits, one detail eventually shifts our perception: almost all of them cling to their mobile phones, whose electronic glow subtly illuminates their faces like those of madonnas. These smartphones are true talismans for them. Embodying a constant link to their families and countries of origin, they occupy the center of the image as well as the core of a portable emotional galaxy. During her third trip, Evangelia Kranioti chose to photograph these women in perpetual movement, inside a car. Between two suburbs. Between two worlds. Between two identities. These vehicles become the paradoxical symbol of both their confinement and their liberation, the climax where dream and reality, fear and ecstasy merge until they are indistinguishable.

Those who usually have everything to hide then reveal, within this protected space, their stories and their trophies at the heart of urban chaos: labyrinthine parking lots, fields of ruins destined for real estate developers, or “Big Sale” supermarkets—symptoms of excessive consumerism. All these women share a defiance of the camera’s lens, and through it, of the viewer, from whom they demand not compassion but resonance. Their questioning gaze, often direct and sometimes sideways, seems to call for the (radical) benevolence that the kafala system has attempted to erase. On the margins of the protests that have shaken the country in crisis since 2018, during a photo shoot organized against all odds, almost clandestinely, by Evangelia Kranioti—whose practice as a filmmaker and video artist (Obscuro barroco, 2018, and Exotica, erotica, etc., 2015) is also evident here—the Misses surrender themselves entirely to their ideals and regain a lost dignity.

Matthieu Orléan