Exhibitions

I have always looked at people with an attentive eye.

As a child, I felt uneasy in the face of difference, simply because I did not understand it. Back then, disability and differences were rarely talked about. They were often hidden.

Years later, life confronted me with my greatest fears: my first daughter, Lise, was born with a difference, a rare and severely disabling syndrome. What I once dreaded became a source of strength and openness. Lise taught me patience, trust and the benefits of letting go.

The hardest part was not the disability itself, but the gaze of others: that gaze full of incomprehension that I had myself cast as a child.

Through this project, I wish in turn to raise awareness and offer another vision of beauty: that of strength, vulnerability and resilience. By giving a voice and a face to those we too often look at without seeing, I hope to contribute to a fairer, kinder society, where everyone can find their place.

For her 30th birthday, Catherine received a diagnosis that turned her life upside down: neuromyelitis optica combined with multiple sclerosis, two paralysing autoimmune diseases.

In love with freedom, travel and hiking, she found in the illness the courage to live entirely on her own terms. She sold everything, left everything behind and set off backpacking alone, to live fully for as long as her body allows it.

Her relationship to the gaze of others changed too. Before using a walking aid, she was often judged for her hesitant walk. Once she adopted the stick, then the rollator and today the wheelchair, the looks became kind.

Ten years later, she continues to travel and to commit to meaningful projects. She puts words on the journeys that life transforms, the bodies that tell stories, the souls that rise again. Because deep down, it is often our greatest ordeals that reveal our most beautiful strengths.