I want that my difference to count, to produce something symbolic, Liana Borghi, 1989.

Benzine Cyprine is a long-term documentary (2014 to 2020) about a group of women of the same name. This is also a symbol of identity.

At the initiative of this project was a compelling need to respond to an existential malaise around the fact of being female. This was a feeling aroused by daily and degrading problems oriented against this gender.
How to evoke the insecurity consecutive to the lust of the female body often reduced to its erotic potential? How do we address the preconceptions that tend to maintain the female gender as vulnerable, infantile and denigrated? How to question the moralising stereotypes about it? How can we account for this while being careful not to impose on women the status of victim by nature?

My answer was to show a flamboyant femininity that goes against the grain of the soppy, self-indulgent and hypersexed figures of the woman, the ones that saturated the media flows of the big and small screens, of the press or even of the advertising. I then began to photograph symbols of a particular feminine identity that inspires both sensuality and virility. This symbolism is expressed through the moments of life of a gang of women, their personalities and their attitudes. As group identity, in my opinion, offers valorization, respect, cohesion and strength of claim in total opposition to the feeling of vulnerability.

The Benzine Cyprine are this explosive cocktail that represents a desire to access enjoyment and emancipation by exteriorizing one's individuality in a sovereign way.
They demonstrate that one can find one's own way of embodying one's gender beyond the injunctions of one's sex. But nowadays this process is neither spontaneous nor innate. It is constructed, it is influenced.

It is with this in mind that I wanted to represent the Benzine Cyprine in an attractive way as a gender brand. My way of representing this concept of female gang has for goal to make believe in their existence. The principle is to arouse enthusiasm and pride going against the state of mind they represent. I value this female identity by the same processes borrowed from advertising (attractive aesthetics, graphic chart, slogan, projection into reality...). It is an ironic attitude of mine which follows the rules of a world where the emotion holds more the attention than the intellectualization, where the entertainment gets more fascination than the development of a thought.
Therefore, fiction and its sensationalism also have their impact on the way we imagine our future and question reality. And when it is a question of transmitting an idea, photography has this advantage of being more fulgurating than words.