Targeted Women
These women weren’t leading the same battles, walking in the same streets or speaking in the same forums. Yet they were all victims of the same crime: political feminicide.
These gender-based political assassinations are invisible crimes. They consist of killing women, both for the cause they are fighting for, and because they are women.
“Femmes à abattre” (Targeted Women) is the first journalistic investigation that has ever looked into these sexist crimes perpetrated all over the world. We’ve gathered hundreds of texts, images and data in order to build a collective work that will help identifying the specific threats that women human rights activists are facing, and the mechanism of impunity that surrounds them.
Political feminicides are like “cluster bombs”. By committing these murders, perpetrators manage to silence the women who dared taking up the public voice. At the same time, they hang a sword of Damocles above the head of their successors, those who aim to take over their battle.
While women activists are more numerous than ever, it is urgent to document these crimes. This way, states, institutions and NGOs will provide better support to today’s and tomorrow’s activists.
For this investigation, I’ve worked with various sources : archive photographs, excerpts from the court files, maps… It was then necessary to give meaning and coherence to all of this. So I chose to make cyanotypes, with its characteristic indigo blue colour, then I superimposed and arranged them with an image processing software.
Here are the visuals of this investigation, finalist for the Visa d’Or for digital information at the Visa pour l’Image Festival in Perpignan in 2023.