Virginie PLAUCHUT
Agency role
Hans Lucas
Alès, France
Virginie Plauchut has been working for several years on long-term projects concerning issues and taboos related to childhood. Her work addresses notions of memory and intimacy, but also of suffering and silence. Her photographic practice revolves between documentary and author photography.
In a first series entitled "Without evidence and without corpse", she tries to give meaning to words extracted from the testimonies of victims of incest, by associating them with photographs illustrating these memories. For her work on the defunct institutions of the “Good Shepherd” and penitenciary colonies entitled "the High Walls", the photographer questions and documents those stolen childhoods returning to these locations walled in silence and pain. Plauchut also captures sites and landscapes to find a clue or to keep the remembrance alive, as in the case with her series "The Disappeared" where the photographer tells us of 20 cases of missing children for which there is neither trace nor certainty.
Her work has resulted in numerous exhibitions in France and abroad, particularly in Circulation (s) festival in Paris, ManifestO festival in Toulouse, the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Niort and in several galleries and festivals. In 2014, Virginie Plauchut was named finalist for the Oscar Barnack Leica prize.
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WITHOUT PROOF AND WITHOUT CORPSE
Virginie PLAUCHUT
These ordinary objects that remained untouched are the recollection of memories that are hidden deep down inside but that can’t be erased. They come back all the time. We try to understand them. We replay the scene to try to find meaning. Based on testimonies, the pictures are the illustration of these little things which are apparently insignificant, that haunt these incest stories made of silences, guilt and solitude. 10,000 incest cases are reported every year in France and 80 % of these cases will never be prosecuted as our culture silences the victims.