Symplectic packings in dimension 4 and singular curves

The main goal of this paper is to give constructive proofs of several existence results for symplectic embeddings. The strong relation between symplectic packings and singular symplectic curves, which can be derived from McDuff's inflations on the blow-ups, is revisited through a new inflation technique that lives at the level of the manifold. As an application, we explain constructions of maximal symplectic packings of $P^2$ by 6, 7 or 8 balls.