Sabine Villiard — Artist
Photographer and artist, born in 1972. My professional path has taken me through fashion (Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Madame Figaro…), street art, portraiture and advertising campaigns, but it is in the shadows that my most intimate work has been taking shape for the past thirty years.
For me, photography has never been a mere tool: it is a language for exploring humanity, History and its tragic repetitions.
In 2020, discovering the family archives after my father’s death upended my practice. These images, these traces, revealed an epigenetic continuity: my solitary exploration has become an extension, a transmission, a dialogue with five generations of buried memories.
La Dernière Gardienne (The Last Guardian) is its culmination: a project in which art becomes an act of remembrance, and every photograph is a fragment of a collective history waiting to be deciphered.
My approach, poised between respect for the traces and reinvention, invites a sensitive reading of History: a History in which individual destinies shed light on conflicts, and faces left intact remind us of the dignity of every life.
Why this project? Because these archives do not belong to me: they belong to our shared memory. Sharing them is no longer a choice but a duty – the duty to pass on a cultural heritage, to make History felt, to refuse oblivion.
One obsession: memory as an act of resistance.
Photographer and artist, born in 1972. My professional path has taken me through fashion (Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Madame Figaro…), street art, portraiture and advertising campaigns, but it is in the shadows that my most intimate work has been taking shape for the past thirty years.
For me, photography has never been a mere tool: it is a language for exploring humanity, History and its tragic repetitions.
In 2020, discovering the family archives after my father’s death upended my practice. These images, these traces, revealed an epigenetic continuity: my solitary exploration has become an extension, a transmission, a dialogue with five generations of buried memories.
La Dernière Gardienne (The Last Guardian) is its culmination: a project in which art becomes an act of remembrance, and every photograph is a fragment of a collective history waiting to be deciphered.
My approach, poised between respect for the traces and reinvention, invites a sensitive reading of History: a History in which individual destinies shed light on conflicts, and faces left intact remind us of the dignity of every life.
Why this project? Because these archives do not belong to me: they belong to our shared memory. Sharing them is no longer a choice but a duty – the duty to pass on a cultural heritage, to make History felt, to refuse oblivion.
One obsession: memory as an act of resistance.