In June 2024, in Brussels, I presented the exhibition Sillage, a photographic project dedicated to children placed in foster care following a court order.
For a year, I traveled to various foster homes across French-speaking Belgium to meet these children and patiently build a relationship of trust. Access to these protected spaces entailed a crucial constraint: preserving the minors' complete anonymity. This boundary became the very heart of the artistic project.
To circumvent the prohibition while respecting their privacy, I invited the children to create their own masks. Both a screen and a revealer, the mask—an age-old tool spanning civilizations—became a means of expression. It protects, but it also allows them to speak. Each mask tells the story of a fragmented identity, an inner strength, a unique imagination.
The exhibition unveiled a series of images where emotions intersect and clash: poetry engages in dialogue with confinement, gentleness collides with solitude, and light emerges from the heart of darkness. The portraits, simultaneously present and absent, invite the viewer to look beyond the visible and to question the very notions of protection, identity, and belonging.
Sillage leaves a trace—that of a fragile encounter, of a masked yet profoundly embodied voice.
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