Citizens of the World - Meyrin

This book is the culmination of a project born at the beginning of the 1990s. A photographer living in our city, Nicolas Faure, came to see me and shared with me his surprise at a rare peculiarity in a city of twenty thousand souls: the presence of inhabitants from over one hundred different nations! Yes, this rather modest town near Geneva - with a population perhaps the equivalent of a couple of apartment blocks in a large urban centre - has become the permanent home of foreign nationals from all over the continents... At that moment, i became quickly convinced that the project proposed by our photographer - to make portraits of a certain number of these inhabitants in their family environments, "at home" - should be supported and promoted as much as possible.

- Roger Portier

In Meyrin one finds the heart of the world. Diplomats and refugees. People from the north, people from the south. Laborers and intellectuals. Fondue and baklava. Natives and immigrants. Foreigners, some of whom take part in advisory committees; there is even a young people's parliament in Meyrin. A mosaic. It was time to go out and meet this wold. Behind each door there is a different story, and what is so special about these stories taken together is that they tell at once the story of the city, that circumscribed place within a small territory, and the story of the vast world struggling to live. (...) To those who doubt, to those who fear, to those who judge askance, and to those who break off dialogue in ignorance, this testimony of exemplary cohabitation, this vision of a special city, is dedicated to humility

-Andre Klopmann