Through photography, Lucie Pastureau attempts to capture the subtle shifts that individuals experience, to depict what is not visible. She conceives of this medium as an encounter with the other and is interested in periods of transition and everyday vulnerabilities.
The artist views her practice as a form of research, a poetic language: she hones words, manipulates images, orders and classifies them, and studies their narrative potential…
After working for a long time on adolescence, and then drawing on her experience of pregnancy, a year ago she initiated the project “Les Corps Elastiques,” with the support of the Institut pour la Photographie, focusing on the transforming body.
Meeting other bodies, whether expansive or constrained, with unique life stories, she composes a collective narrative driven by a surge of emancipation, reappropriation, and reconciliation. The encounters/portraits that punctuate this narrative are, for the photographer, a way of making visible the complexity induced by social injunctions, normalization, and stereotypes.
Within the exhibition, texts, whether read or written, accompany the photographs. They open up a new dimension, that of a poetic language in which images, voices, and intimate narratives intertwine.
“Some grow, their bodies stretch, it’s as if they want to escape them, they spit in the face of childhood and rush into adolescence. Sometimes they starve themselves to slow down the expansion and deformation, and thus accelerate their fall. Others, in their entangled and constrained bodies, try to cope with their rigidities, to become lighter and tame the pain. And then there are those who become women (and vice versa), who have always felt their skin itching because it doesn’t match their inner form. And then there are those others, inhabited for several months by a being who resembles them.” Some are in a state of fusion, like true nesting dolls; for others, it’s impossible even to imagine, and their bodies try to make them forget it.”
– Lucie Pastureau, excerpt from Les Corps Elastiques
Les Corps Elastiques / Lucie Pastureau
Feb 13 – Jul 4, 2026
Institut pour la Photographie
Lille, France
