ARTIST STATEMENT, ROOTS AND GAZES

My photographic work is born from a simple yet deeply rooted desire: to restore Black women’s sovereignty over their own image, to show them as they are and as they see themselves: proud, resilient, aware, dignified.

For a long time, Black women have been perceived and represented through colonial legacies, exotic imaginaries, and fantasmatic projections, as analyzed notably by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks. My work questions and challenges these representations, which have produced incomplete and often biased narratives, in order to bring dignity, pride, and strength to the foreground.

My practice is anchored in a redefinition of the gaze.
how I look at the other, how I see the other.
It is a loving, affirming gaze, one that builds confidence, liberates, and uplifts.
A plural gaze, at times inward, at times outward, at times withheld.
From these shifting gazes emerges a sovereign gaze grounded in self-awareness, choice, and reciprocity.

Who looks at whom?
Here, the woman looks back and determines for herself how, and to what extent, she becomes visible.
This visual language resonates with what bell hooks and Carole Boyce Davies have called talking back: reclaiming speech, returning the gaze.

Photography, for me, is not only an act of appropriation or fixation, but a relational act: a form of presence and encounter. My images arise from proximity, trust, and time for the human being, for the body, for light.

My work is an ode to Africa and its diaspora, and to the inspiring power of the Black woman.
She stands at the heart of my work: source of life, bearer of traditions, memory in motion. I explore her identity, her role, and her contribution in the contemporary world, where tradition and modernity intersect.

I do not only photograph women and girls from everyday life: I participate in their stories and amplify their voices within a symbolic and aesthetic dimension. Each is a presence, a symbol, an active subject. Each image is a breath; each portrait, a voice. They speak of struggle and hope, fragility and resilience, dignity and inner strength. Between the intimate and the collective, between memory and the present, photography becomes a space of resistance, beauty, and affirmation.

Drawing from my African heritage, experiences, aspirations, and encounters with other cultures, my work seeks to displace what Achille Mbembe calls the “geography of otherness”: those spaces in which the Other is assigned and confined.

Here, the image is no longer an object, but becomes a site of presence and speech, a space where a plural identity and an inner subjectivity can finally be articulated from within.

Beyond photography, and beyond aesthetics, my images invite proximity and call for a rethinking of the representation of the Black female body within the collective gaze.