Youqine Lefebvre - Lone Islands
Charles Nègre Museum of Photography, historical partner of the festivalL’IMAGE SATELLITE, presents each year in its gallery, the work of an emerging artist on the contemporary photographic scene that receives the Satellite Award. For this edition 2026, the winner is Youqine Lefèvre for her workLone Islands.
Lone Islands has as its starting point the low birth rate observed in Japan, which is currently the country with the largest number of older people in the world, and extends to become political, societal, social, economic, cultural and intimate. I look at the causes and consequences of this "question" and its possible solutions. The images taken so far are the result of two residences at 3331 Chiyoda Arts in Tokyo and travels to Kyushu, Kyoto, Gifu and Niigata Prefectures and Sado and Yakushima Islands to compare urban and rural areas. This work portrays the current Japan, far from the time when the country experienced a dramatic economic growth between the 1960s and 1990s. After the oil shock of 1973 and the bursting of the speculative bubble in the 1990s, the Archipelago is now confronted with a
demographic decline. The number of marriages continues to decline, while the number of single persons is increasing. The current era and economic difficulties highlight the limits of the nuclear family where the mother always has to take care of the house and children. This work also involves a sociological approach; About 90 people have been interviewed and addressed to them the subjects of the family, love, masculinity, gender inequalities, patriarchy, ageing, end of life, report to work, mental health, social pressure, isolation that can be felt when living in a megalopolis,... with the desire to deconstruct stereotypes on Japan, to bring nuance and to light its complexity. What if, in addition to economic stagnation, this demographic decline was the result of the opposition between tradition and modernity?
Youqine Lefèvre(1993, CN) is a Belgian asio-descendante photographer currently based in Brussels, Belgium. His artistic practice, which combines photography, archives, video, research and text, is an exploration of the relationship between intimacy and politics.
Through individual narratives, her own and others, she seeks to place the intimate within a broader collective framework, retracing the way in which family structures, memory and emotional ties form, tend and transform under the influence of political and social pressures. With a strong interest in sociology, his work poses a critical and profoundly sensitive look at these issues, addressing what is often unspoken in the spaces between the individual and the world he lives.
In particular, the artist exhibited at the FOMU (Anvers, BE), at The Photographers’ Gallery (London, UK), at the Centre de la Photographie de Genève (CH), in Photo Elysée (Lausanne, CH), at Photoforum PasquArt (Biel/Bienne, CH). She published with The Eriskay Connection (NL, 2022). The book was selected for the Paris Photo – Aperture First PhotoBook Award 2022.