Route de Matourne

Route de Matourne is an intimate portrait of my cousins, Lio and Eline, during a summer holiday in August. This project is an exploration of sisterhood in all its tenderness and tensions. What does sisterhood mean and how to capture such an intimate bond?

Route de Matourne is an intimate portrait series born from the desire to capture the fleeting presence of my cousins, Lio and Eline, during a summer holiday in August. Drawn to both their similarities and their differences, I felt an urgency to record this moment of transition as they grow into themselves. The work is, at its core, an exploration of sisterhood, its tenderness, its tensions, and its quiet bonds. Through the lens, I sought a purity of observation, an honest reflection of what this connection means to me.

The title, Route de Matourne, refers not only to the name of the road we traveled, but also gestures to the word “mature” in both French and English, a layered wordplay that mirrors this threshold moment in their lives.

This vacation unfolded in the exact origins of the word vacātiō, “to be empty, at leisure, free”. Days swollen with heat, skin sticky, the whole house breathing boredom. A stillness you could almost drown in.

It was a Monday mid August when, at three in the morning I left for an eleven hour drive to the south of France. No stops, no detours, just one single way into my holiday. When I finally pulled up, my cousins were already waiting on the porch. All shoulders and knees, waving, laughing in excitement for the coming week we’d spend together. The air smelled sharp with cypress, softened by the chlorine bite flowing from the pool. My muscles felt weak from the drive but I felt the adrenaline pumping through me.
My cousins are between the ages of 18 and 22, at the onset of adolescence, a period in their lives marked by emotional complexity, physical transformation and emerging self-awareness. That bruised threshold where you’re half-grown but still raw, all nerves and bright edges.

The photographs of my cousins glow like a reflection of this place, the South of France. But not the one with yachts and glasses clinking. This is the quiet South, folded between fields of sunflowers and old stone walls. Where the only noise you might hear is your neighbour’s donkey braying down the street or the cicadas drilling into the night. You live beside the wasps, sharing breakfast with them, their hunger stitched into the same air as yours. These images smell of wet grass at dawn, sunscreen, of oranges split open in your hands. 

My practice approaches photography like it’s a film I’m making in fragments, where every image is a ‘scripted’ choice, charged with urgency yet restrained. Style is inseparable from this process, I’m drawn to simplicity that remains layered, images that negotiate between clarity and complexity. And at the core, always, is connection, a felt alignment with the subject that gives the work resonance. Without it, the photograph is static; with it, it comes alive.