New Queens by Sandra Reinflet

Past exhibition

Discover Sandra Reinflet's photographic exhibition at Saint-Denis Cathedral Basilica!

From 19 September 2024 to 27 April 2025
Admission

Free admission to the exhibition after paying the necropolis entrance fee (on site or online).
Public
General public
Purchase online

Presentation

Artist Sandra Reinflet takes over the Cathedral Basilica of Saint-Denis with an exhibition entitled "Nouvelles Reines" (New Queens), combining photographic portraits and texts.

Thirty-two queens of France are buried in the cathedral basilica of Saint-Denis. From Arégonde, the Merovingian queen and daughter-in-law of Clovis, to Marie-Antoinette at the dawn of the Revolution, these queens left their mark on the history of France, despite their exclusion from power. Several stained glass windows, created in the ^19th century for this monument, recall their presence and their often exceptional destinies.

32 queens, 32 portraits

Sandra Reinflet has photographed and projected these stained glass windows onto the bodies of thirty-one female residents of Saint-Denis and Aubervilliers. The exhibition begins with a series of portraits displayed on the forecourt outside the basilica, and continues in the crypt of the royal necropolis. At the end of the exhibition, a space will be set aside with a projected stained-glass window so that visitors can take a photograph in a similar way to the artist's work. In this way, the thirty-second and final portrait of the "New Queens" will appear.

Meeting the new queens

To put together this exhibition, Sandra Reinflet went to meet a number of women in various social structures in Saint-Denis and Aubervilliers. Several writing workshop sessions were needed to create a bond of trust between the artist and the participants. An ephemeral photographic studio was then set up in each of the locations to produce portraits inspired by each participant's background.

The stained glass projections sketched a surprising and poetic mosaic on their skin. The artist's aim is to highlight the resilience, courage and determination of these women, who are the queens of today. The texts accompanying the portraits retrace the journeys of these little-known neo-sovereigns.

Who is Sandra Reinflet?

Sandra Reinflet is from Dionys, and has been working for the last fifteen years with so-called 'disadvantaged' audiences. As an author and photographer, she has developed a body of work that she has committed to over the long term, putting the spotlight on people who are far removed from it. In the housing estates of the 93 district, in the hyper-rurality of our diagonals of emptiness, in women's prisons or with unaccompanied minors, she shows through her creative work that the words of these sensitive audiences are essential. These voices need to be heard, these faces need to be seen if we are to change the way we see them. And she does this with exacting artistic ambition.

She was awarded the Prix Roger Pic by SCAM in 2020 for her photographic work on artists forced to work for religious or political reasons around the world (a series produced over six years in Iran, Mauritania, Papua New Guinea, Madagascar and Brazil, exhibited at the MAC in Créteil, at SCAM, at the Musée de la résistance du Morvan, at numerous photo festivals and winner of the Carré sur Seine Members' Prize).

Following a year-long writing and photography residency in the Cité du Franc-Moisin in 2022 (initiated by the Seine Saint-Denis department), currently undergoing urban renewal, she created Ma place, an exhibition of large-format portraits in situ, co-created with residents, a street artist and an architectural firm. The thirty portraits exhibited in structures created for the occasion, in the heart of the district, aimed to show the human heritage of a city often reduced to its architecture or its news stories.

Sandra Reinflet, who is deeply involved in the area where she lives, has also produced a photo-text exhibition on the invisibility of young women in suburban towns. This work was co-produced with apprentice photographers at a vocational college and exhibited on twenty giant tarpaulins around the Cathedral Basilica of Saint-Denis.

Winner of the Grande Commande Photographique competition launched by the Ministry of Culture and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in 2022, she has just produced a six-month report entitled "The Price of Silence" on the process of buying social peace around the nuclear waste burial project at Bure, in the Meuse region.

She is also involved in a number of local cultural initiatives. Recently, she worked with the Landes department and the town of Saint-Malo on a creative project with young adults who had dropped out of school (the series entitled La Vie Augmentée (Augmented Life) portrays them in an ideal vision of themselves), in Marseille and Houlgate on the project Des racines et des mineurs non accompagnés (Roots and unaccompanied minors), and at the Fleury Mérogis women's prison on a story about the individual and collective body... Her artistic approach is resolutely committed to long-term social action.

She is also the author of four books (a novel published by JC Lattès, two stories published by Michalon, and a photo book published by La Martinière).

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