Les Garantes

She stays alone in this silent house. Frozen in time. In the centre of the room, the one with the drawn curtains, stands his mother’s old silverware furniture. Someone put a lace doily on it. Two candelabrums surround a blue vase with a bunch of false flowers faded by years.

Frightened by these frozen images, she goes upstairs and runs a bath to relieve her distress and boredom. She makes the secret wish to run away to these windy heights, to these wild cliffs, to these wild lands like Catherine, the heroine of the Emily Brontë’s novel, Wuthering Heights, rather than being locked up in this noxious house, waiting for something to happen in order to liberate her. She hears a piano melody, coming up from downstairs.

For as long as she can remember, she’s always been stopped by codes, precepts passed on through her education, handled by the women of the family, from generation to generation. She has internalized these norms who push her back to her role, the role she has to play as a woman, discreet, well-behaved, obedient, surrounded by religious images, admonished with moral rules. She, she and I are part of these thousands of women who want a new start, who want to shout out to this world: this is not our world.

This serie, called « Les Garantes », started in 2023, questions bloodlines, questions transmissions between women of several generations drawing a parallel between enclosed spaces and wilderness. Images of the family house nearby the city of Vichy (France) are combined with landscapes of lands, lochs and mountains located in the Torredon area, Scottish Highlands. Magic and mystery reign in theses universes who respond to each other, through landscapes, fogs and legends who haunt these places.