Unusual Insular
This series of unusual images takes place in Belle Ile en mer ; a French rocky island off the coast of Brittany, where Aurelia used to go every summer growing up.
There, she reconnects with the origins of her family, since a sailor great-great-grand-father made a stopover in Marseille and met a local. Grandpa Coco and Granny Titine married and founded a family. Since then, every generation after them was eager to journey from their South to this beautiful britannic island, may it be for a few years or a few summer seasons.
Aurelia’s love and passion for photography seeded and grew strong there, she sharpened hey eye on wind-swept moorlands, on crumbly hills offering stunning views of the raging sea, on the beaches enlightened by the golden light of late afternoons, across the hundreds of endless fields. There she met the “bellilois”, the residents, and she started photographing them. As they were growing up, she kept photographing them, whilst being moved by their physical and lifestyle changes. When the years, when life tears them apart, the occasion of a photo session always presents itself to reunite them back.
The characters of this series are a sample of lifetime and seasonal islanders, of close family, and friends. A sea rescuer she saw monitoring the horizon for over 15 years, a friend she met on the beach a decade ago when he didn’t have any dreadlocks yet, her mother and aunt called “the twins” who both grew up on the island, and the members of a family she met there, who ended up being distant cousins. Happy coincidence of genealogy and insularity.
This project is thus at the meeting point between composition and reportage. Emblematic characters, archetypes of Belle Ile en mer, posing at the heart of landscapes evocating the raw beauty of this unique and timeless island. All of this forms improbable situations, which astonish and confront the universes.
