View of Bobbi Lockyer’s exhibition Origines at La Gacilly Photo Festival 2024 – Photo Jean-Michel Niron
The La Gacilly Photography Festival is an annual immersive photographic experience as you stroll around 20 or so open-air galleries presenting the very best in contemporary photographic creation that questions our relationship with our world and our natural environment.
Photographs adorn the streets, gardens and alleys of La Gacilly, whose outstanding built and natural heritage provides a perfect backdrop to the thousand or so images on display. Public space becomes a stage, shared and open to all, free of charge.
Every summer, some 300,000 people come to the La Gacilly Photo Festival with family or friends, as newcomers or devoted regulars, to enjoy large-format, open-air exhibitions of some of the greatest names and emerging talents in photography.
The 21th edition’s theme is “Australie & Autres Regards”, focusing on Australia, and it features Australian First Nations artist Bobbi Lockyer.
Bobbi Lockyer is, in her own words, a pink-haired, feminist, queer mermaid queen with a passion for color, who works to disrupt social circles with her art. An art she creates through clothing, traditional works (material and digital), paintings… and photographs.
Born on Kariyarra land in Port Hedland, she is a representative of the Ngarluma, Kariyarra, Nyul Nyul and Yawuru peoples. Honored as a NAIDOC Artist Celebrating Aboriginal Culture for 2021, and an ambassador for Nikon Australia, Bobbi Lockyer draws inspiration from ancestral stories, the vibrant colors of her natural environment, the waves of the ocean, and her deep commitment to her community to nurture an artistic approach that transcends convention.
She offers a window on the intimate through works that also serve as a platform to defend causes dear to her heart, such as social justice, the rights of indigenous peoples, and women’s rights, including Birthing on Country: a movement that helps women from aboriginal peoples to give birth in a familiar environment that respects their traditions and identity; a concept that also affirms that the child is born on the sovereign lands of Australia’s first peoples, peoples who have never ceded ownership of their lands, seas and skies to anyone else. These notions of motherhood, transmission and natural heritage are essential for this artist, who knows that the survival of the first peoples depends on the preservation of their ancestral rites.
A necessary struggle too: in 2023, after a historic referendum, Australia voted “no” to constitutional recognition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the original inhabitants of the island-continent. A failure at the end of a campaign that further deepened the country’s racial divisions.
“Birthing on Country” by Bobbi Lockyer, shown at La Gacilly Photo Festival 2024
SOURCE: La Gacilly Photo Festival.