Our college years is a work done by photographer and director Valérie Winckler. For 4 years, from 1992 to 1995, she followed, from the 6th to the 3rd, pupils of the College Marx Dormoy (Paris 18th) and College La Fontaine du Roy in Ville d’Avray (92). She photographed them during their school activities, and each year she did their portraits setting up a studio in a classroom. She then recorded, taking two by two, their reactions to their portrait as well as their reflections on this moment of transition to adolescence. It is from this work that she made the documentary film The hour of the swimming pool.
During these 4 years, Valérie Winckler collaborated with teachers of French and Art. Thus, from their portraits, a dialogue was established between the two colleges and students spent a day in their reciprocal colleges. She helped create, in the two colleges, a mime workshop animated by Elena Serra, assistant of the mime Marcel Marceau. At the end of the internship, she photographed the feeling that each student wanted to express.
I dreamed for a long time of a project on the transition from childhood to adolescence.
The adolescence of my own children, their friends, and the children of the neighborhood.
I have always been struck by this period of transition where they seem to hesitate between childhood and adolescence: their body loses its lightness, it changes, it clutters them. They do not know what to do and they look for a composure .
This is the age of the gaps: between young people of the same age, between boys and girls …
It’s the age of contrasts with children’s games in a girl’s body, with dreams of teenagers in a doll’s head.
The voices of the boys swing between highs and lows, the bodies between clumsiness and grace. This passage is made of hesitations, backtracking, flights and fears.
As part of the exhibition Nos Années Collège, Valérie Winckler will set up a studio and photograph alumni again.
Valérie Winckler – Nos années collège
April 4 to 28, 2019
Galerie de l’Entr@cte
Place Robert Schumann
3-5 rue de Versailles
92410 Ville d’Avray
