The exhibition reawakening women’s resistance and fight for freedom from the past.

What does girlhood mean to you — personally, politically, and artistically?

VD: Girlhood is a time of experimentation, a very intense period of the construction of a personal and social identity. It brings together strength and vitality, as well as vulnerability. Going through the archives but also reading the works of eminent historians such as Veronique Blanchard, Beatrice Koeppel or Françoise Tetard, we realised that there is a form of social and political continuum considering girlhood through the unique lens of sexuality, which society wishes to repress.

AG: Adolescence is a time of transition, of revelation, sometimes of painful injunction. Through the photographs and texts of the exhibition, I insisted on the dimension of the oblique body, of the female body as a dissident body and a body that extracts itself from the norms. Claiming the female body as a disobedient figure.

Your images feel suspended in time — both historical and contemporary.

AG: Suspension is a recurring motif in my work. For me, it evokes a time of latency, of non-fatality, between fall and rise, a time when everything is still possible. The suspended female bodies represent resistant bodies, which prevent the fall, and rise again.

Lucas Olivet