Artist born in 1993, lives and works in Paris. 

To the traditional perception of bodies, Louise Rocard opposes a resistance. She stages her own to question gender identity and imagine its possible mutations.
The character she embodies in the series of photographs The girl who fell to earth (2020) has everything extraterrestrial. In the middle of the abandoned territories of a sand quarry, she falls, crawls, sometimes floats. She is alone – or almost, because the performance is produced under the knowing eye of photographer and cinematographer Gordon Spooner. The work is a barely concealed homage to Thomas Jerome Newton, an androgynous humanoid fallen from the sky played by David Bowie in the film "The man who fell to earth" (1975) by Nicolas Roeg. It is also, perhaps, a nod to the Ovidian account of the fall of Icarus, questioning the limits of the body constantly brought back to the laws of physics. All in all, it sounds like a test

of the body in the wild space. And asks the following question: does the body forge our identity? Without having the ambition to give a definitive answer, Louise Rocard draws the contours of a troubled identity, less human than animal, more arachnid than woman.
So much so that it is sometimes difficult for us to distinguish where the body stops and where the rock begins. The artist is dressed in a zentai, a skin-tight jumpsuit covering her entire body, a costume traditionally used in Japan to "neutralize" the personality of the person who wears it. The result is crying out for bestiality: if the costume aims to abolish the structuring glances of the other on oneself, it produces here the effect of a creature which gives itself to be seen without being quite seen, which blends almost among dunes and rocks. Louise Rocard draws as much from dystopian tales as from exobiology and astrophysics, disciplines which she rubs shoulders with as an autodidact in contact with many scientists. The landscapes of the series refer with confusing clarity to those of Mars, which she speaks of as “our most dystopian future possible”. However, far from giving in to the imagination of a hostile and inert planet, the artist reminds us that his lands are home to varied territories, made up of peaks, craters, valleys and mountains. His work makes the alliance between the body, this entity from here, straddling nature and culture, and the rocky earth of an elsewhere.