Cherche RADIUMINEUSE

Cherche RADIUMINEUSE is a photographic tribute to Swiss women who painted radium on watch dials from the 1920s–60s, risking their health. It explores memory, silence, and industrial injustice.

Cherche RADIUMINEUSE is a photographic exploration of a little-known facet of Swiss industrial history: the contribution and fate of the female workers known as ‘Radiumineuses’.

Between the 1920s and the 1960s, hundreds of women workers applied radium-based phosphorescent paint to watch dials and hands, enabling them to tell the time in the dark. For years, they repeated the same meticulous gestures in factories or at home, handling the radioactive substance without adequate protection. The bodies of these women, and sometimes those of their loved ones, were thus exposed to serious and irreversible risks. Invisible, many of these workers saw their health sacrificed for the watchmaking industry, symbol of Swiss excellence.

Faced with a lack of visual representations, I chose to produce photographs that are both dreamlike and spectral, inspired by the testimonies and memories of those who knew or worked alongside these women. I combined them with cropped archive documents and photographs of objects found during the clean-up of contaminated buildings.

The work is both an investigation and a tribute. It questions the historical silence and indifference towards the fate of the little hands, while highlighting the existence and contribution of these women. More broadly, this work invites reflection on resilience, justice and the recognition of people who are invisible in official narratives.