A sea separates them. France, Morocco, where do these young girls live? What are they dreaming about? Louisa Ben voluntarily leaves the doubt. In a work that has taken her to both shores of the Mediterranean, the artist, now 27, captures her models in their fierce pride, their languor or their shyness, which forces their gaze to escape . A generation that she endeavored to evoke in a series of twenty portraits.
Accompanied by the mentorship of the Régnier Fund for Creation and the Vu’ agency, which aims to support emerging photographers, Louisa Ben embarked on a project on Moroccan youth, with “a fairly tight deadline”, she says.
French by her mother, Chantal, Moroccan by her father, Lahoucine, a Berber from Tiznit (in the south of Morocco), she grew up in Toulouse without cultivating a real link with her father’s culture. “I grew up in a very Franco-French environment. We went on vacation to Morocco from time to time, but I didn’t speak the language. As a child, I saw this country as a distant land where people seemed to be waiting for me. For a long time, I felt quite distant from this culture, without it being a total detachment. On each trip, I felt out of place. » It was only as she approached her 20th birthday that Louisa Ben felt the desire to reconnect with her roots, “to which we [la] always sent back to France”, while she herself feels so French.
” In their room “
She had then just abandoned her studies in audiovisual communication, “too much boredom” to study photography in a school in Toulouse. His models? “Women war reporters, in particular Véronique de Viguerie. Even if my practice is very far from their work, I admire their strength, their courage,” she admits. In her photography school, she discovered the power of documentary and the technique of film, the rigor of which she continues to cherish today.
As part of the mentorship, she is preparing a trip to Morocco. “I left alone, with my paternal family, but, without my being able to explain it, it was impossible for me to photograph relatives. » She therefore goes to cities that are unknown to her, recruits a fixer (a guide who serves as a guide, and often as a translator and assistant to journalists in their reports), to get in touch with models likely to agree to participate. to her project: young women of her generation who “could have been sisters, cousins or friends”.
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