When I arrived in Athens in December 2016, I didn't go to City Plaza directly. I wandered around the city for some time before meeting Eleni, a Greek lady who was volunteering there. Suddenly, I find myself at the hotel for the 3rd day in a row, cutting onions. It's the first time I'd ever cut onions for 400 people.

I speak Italian with Alessandro, English with two American volunteers and one Scotsman, French with Ziad who comes from Algeria. I didn't speak to the old Iranian man, he can speak only Farsi and I can't... But there was no need to talk— a look was enough. Later he would take me in his arms. I cried, onions, of course, onions. We served, ate and I went to the bar for a cup of coffee. On one of the numerous boards: "Activities for children, you're welcome to offer activities to children." Hence the idea came to me of a photo workshop.

On the last day of my trip, I meet Zie (Xiaofu) through a friend from Berlin. She is a photographer. Although she’s afraid of children, she is interested in the project after coming with me to Plaza and she tells me she’ll be there in February, we'll work together.

Back in Metz, I quickly gather up ten digital cameras, this and my private collection of point-and-shoot analogue ones, plus a whole bunch of colour film. With 20 kilos of photo equipment and many questions, I fly back to Athens. Will the project be welcomed? What about the children who seem to be much more fidgety than the ones I'm used to at school in France? How will we be able to communicate? How will it be possible for each child to have a camera when there are 150 of them and I have only 20 cameras? I wanted to let the children write their own lives in pictures.

In the first two days we organised two well-supervised photo excursions. The first was to a football match between two squats in the Exarchiea district, and the second was in the hotel’s kitchen, where the kids photographed volunteers making lunch. I soon realised, however, that if I didn't want to come back with ten cameras showing identical pictures, I had to let go of my fear of not seeing the cameras again. I started handing cameras to the children in the morning and told them they had to bring them back in the evening. We created a so-called "Give me a camera” waiting list, which allowed the cameras to rotate around, and more importantly, let the children show their individual lives inside the hotel. And so the “mass production of pictures" was born inside City Plaza. Aside from this arrangement we opened a photo studio from 11 to 5 P.M. every day. With a piece of gold cloth as the photographic background and a reflector near the window allowing the sunbeams to be sent back on to the white walls and onto the people, we managed to take about 200 portraits in a fortnight.

Inside the studio, as we had done outside with the cameras, we let the children take more responsibility and control, allowing them to use the “expensive” camera, as well as experiment with light, direct models and use costumes and props. Reviewing the photos afterwards, we realised that children actually took better portraits than we did! The subjects of the portraits looked totally relaxed and alive in the portraits taken by Samir (12), Amir (6), Hassan (12) or Hasnain (10), whereas with us, they were holding something back.

Little by little we tried to become invisible, letting the children carrying on with the project that was made for them with increasingly less of our supervision. Our role was to be careful educators, offering help but without imposing limitations, always trying to listen to the children's own ideas.
The original idea was to illuminate this magical place through the eyes of the children who live there. We wanted to show that alternatives exist to the often undignified camps run by the governments of the world. In less than two weeks we managed to establish a mutual trust that allowed us to produce just over 10,000 images together. We transmitted our photographic ethos as we see it: photography as a way of writing, giving the children the possibility to have their own voice.