Michele Cattani
Michele Cattani is documentary photographer born in Italy in 1991. He holds a master’s degree in film and media engineering from the Polytechnic University of Turin and the Monterrey Institute of Technology in Mexico. He made his first trip to Mali in 2017. Since then, he has lived in Bamako for many years, shooting reportages and documentaries in the region, mainly for AFP, as well as for several international newspapers, television stations, NGOs and UN agencies As a photographer and video documentarist, he uses these languages to better understand the context around him and to add complexity to his vision.His work is a way of putting others at the centre and pursuing stories beyond his own sphere of knowledge and certainty. “Just as it is true that the shortest distance between two points is always a straight line, it is also true that the longest distance is indeterminate.”
A man moves crushed rocks in the Guidan Daka, a processing centre where gold is extracted a few kilometres from Arlit, northern The resulting powder will be sieved into water where liquid mercury is poured in to attract the gold dust and chemically separate it from the rock.
The high environmental impact dependent on the use of this metal leads to the early development of diseases for those who breathe its vapors, but also for those who are indirectly impacted through contamination of groundwater.
