Through her photography and her manipulation of archival images (collages, montages), Pauline Hisbacq’s work poetically explores themes of youth, desire, rites of passage, and resistance. She seeks out emotions within forms and figures. Today, she explores the connections between the personal and the political, between myth and the contemporary.
The project Songs for women and birds is a series of collages created from archival images of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp (1981–2000). There, ordinary women fought peacefully, on their own, against the deployment of nuclear missiles by the United States right here in England, which helped fuel the terror of the Cold War. They sang in resistance to the police, and more broadly to the world of domination, for the preservation of future generations, the hope of peace, the protection of humanity, and respect for nature.
The collages focus on how women engage their bodies in a gesture of struggle that stands in stark contrast to current protests. The primary challenge in communicating their rebellion was to remain peaceful at all times, even in the face of police repression. They therefore had to unite their bodies, in tenderness, to stand firm against the domination they denounced and which attacked them. Scissor cuts are made in the archival images of the struggle to highlight the body language specific to the women of Greenham.Pauline Hisbacq was born in 1980 in Toulouse. She lives and works in Paris. After earning a master’s degree in philosophy, she enrolled at the ENSP in Arles, graduating in 2011. That same year, she went on to complete a postgraduate program at the ICP in New York. Since then, her work has been exhibited notably at the Rencontres de la Jeune Photographie Internationale in Niort (2014), at the Fondation Ecureuil pour l’Art Contemporain in Toulouse (2019), at L’Image Satellite in Nice (2018), at the Friche Belle de Mai in Marseille (2017), at the Photo Paris Saint-Germain festival (2017), Le Bal (2019), and the Centre Photographique Rouen Normandie (2021). She has published *Natalya* with 7 Editions (2016), *Le feu* with September Books (2017), *Amour adolescente (chants d’amour)* with Rayon Vert Éditions (2019), Cadavre Exquis, a fanzine co-published by Le Bal Books and September Books (2021), and Songs for women and birds with September Books (2021). In 2017, she received the CNAP grant for contemporary documentary photography for the project La fête et les cendres. In 2021, she received the Individual Creation Grant from the Drac Ile-de-France for the project *Rimorso*. She is also a recipient of the national commission *Les Regards du Grand Paris*, initiated by the CNAP and the Ateliers Médicis, with the project *Pastorale*. She is currently a photographer at the Rodin Museum and an editor at September Books.
