Youqine Lefèvre

This project is about children living in an isolated foster home in the mountains, and whose parents are temporarily unable to look after them. Children, who have been deprived of what would have been an ordinary life path. They have been transformed by past trauma and find themselves in a transition phase, caught between a world of innocence and of experience, stuck in an in-between, where the world of childhood persists somewhat nonetheless.

Intimacy, childhood, memory, family and its weaknesses are recurring topics in my artistic endeavor I obsess over these concepts for they are directly and deeply related to my personal history, my own adoption.

Far from home is a long-term process in which I set in certain "slowness", the vector of proximity with the people and places photographed. This is quest for intimacy.

Concerning the stones, they are of a particular interest and value to two of boys in the foster home. Having no knowledge what so ever about lithotherapy, they invested the stones with power that enables them to comfort or soothe their anger for instance. Dealing with these stones is a relevant way in my view to further this quest for intimacy.