Produced during an initiatory journey to Mallorca, my mother’s homeland, Les veines de la pierre series explores the silences and absences of our identity as a bond of filiation between mothers and daughters. Using photography as a research method, the camera is transformed into a tool for reappropriating a nebulous and fragmented personal history. Processual, this project takes Mallorque as its field of exploration, drawing up a topography of intimacy and transmission.
Imprinted by the figure of an absent grandfather, this land reveals a personal history in negative where presence is manifest only in its traces, marks and ruins. As an experience of solitude, wandering gives void a weight and a language to its silences, essential to the constitution of identity. It is through the interplay of forms and counter-forms that the question of transmission and resemblance is posed; the impression on the body of imprints and traces passed down from generation to generation find their translation in the impression of light on paper.
As an organic heritage, the motherland is made up of pieces of our identity and our body, made ‘partly of stone and partly of sea’ (Penone). Exploring the analogical relationship between an altered land and a body imprinted with traces makes the village of Banyalbufar ‘shaped by the sea’ in Andalusian my preferred site. Punctuating the series, its stones evoke the foundation of identity as much as they reveal an abstract pattern akin to life itself, where the ramifications of wear and tear are reminiscent of skin marked by time. Fragments of a weakened emotional terrain, they are the pieces we need to rebuild ourselves.
As a woman in the making, faced with a turning point, the return to the mother figure acts like a mirror, opening the way to emancipation from repetitive patterns.
By deconstructing her heritage, she establishes a new self-narrative, the source of liberation. From an autoethnographic perspective, this exploration opens up to a broader spectrum of individual experiences. A personal terrain where the fractures passed down from generation to generation prove structural to the construction of a woman’s identity.
Installation views from:
Galerie Impulse, dans le cadre de la cinquième édition du Festival Impulse, Arles, 2025
Polo del ‘900, dans le cadre du Liquida Photo Festival, Turin, 2025
Galerie du Floréal Belleville, dans le cadre du lancement de la Revue Revive - Fertile Ground, Paris, 2025