Les eaux-fortes
Julie Bourges
With her work, Julie Bourges unfolds a long-term body of work exploring the historical, mythological and political relationship between women and the ocean. Within this broader project, the series Les eaux-fortes occupies a central position, functioning as a point of crystallization where maritime memory, contemporary experienceand the inscription of female bodies within a long-denied territory intersect.
Across several chapters — La main de la sorcière, Les eaux-fortes or Filles du vent— the artist constructs a sensitive cartography of female trajectories historically marginalized in maritime narratives. In Les eaux-fortes, attention shifts to gestures, materials and presences: the sea appears not only as a symbolic horizon but as a surface of inscription. Bodies, tools, boats and landscapes carry the traces of a concrete relationship to labour and to the marine environment.
Her work highlights figures such as ship carpenters, fisherwomen and navigators whose practices embody forms of resistance to deeply rooted social legacies. Long considered unwelcome at sea, these women now reclaim this space through action, skill and endurance. In Les eaux-fortes, vulnerability emerges in the confrontation with natural elements, but also in the persistence of working bodies — exposed, engaged and bound by solidarity.The sea thus becomes an ambivalent territory: a space of emancipation and a site of trial. Everyday gestures — repairing, steering, fishing — take on a political dimension, inscribing women’s bodies within a collective history of reappropriation and transmission. Knowledge of the marine environment appears as situated, shared and embodied.
Through a photographic language that is both documentary and poetic, Bourges weaves images in Les eaux-fortes where the materiality of the sea — salt, wind, rust, water and wood — dialogues with a persistent mythological dimension. The series operates as a sensitive archive: it does not merely document practices but revealstheir symbolic and emotional density.
Resonating with the festival’s themes, Les eaux-fortes invites us to rethink vulnerability as a relational condition — a relationship to living environments, to labour, to territories and to inherited knowledge. Photography becomes a space of attention and memory, where invisibilized narratives regain visibility and the sea emerges as astage for quiet struggles, solidarities and lasting transformations.
Year of production: 2021-2022
Watch the video interview with Aude Mayer on our YouTube channel.
Photoforum Pasquart
Photoforum Pasquart
Faubourg du Lac 71
2502 Biel
