On the occasion of the Documentary and Book Festival “Le Grand Bivouac” which has just been held in Albertville, we set off to discover an original path, traced by the photographer Viviane Lièvre and the French nomadic writer Jean-Yves Loude, guest of the festival. Together, the two ethnologists left from Puy-en-Velay to Galicia via Portugal, in search of pregnant virgins, making the journey a quest for truth, justice and equality.
For its 21st edition which has just ended, the French festival of Albertville has decided to celebrate “remarkable identities”, but also to “take the world to witness”. Witness to the world and its backstage, Jean-Yves Loude is certainly one, as this writer has traveled the world – especially Portuguese-speaking – for more than 30 years to understand it and above all to testify to it on his return.
For many years, we have been following him in So far so close, with his companion Viviane Lièvre, through stories that take us on the trail of the silent memories of Africa, from the Azores to Lisbon via the African continent, or even in the Hindu Kush where they both stayed for a long time as ethnologists.
For his latest story The Path of the Pregnant Virgins », published by Éditions Chandeigne, Jean-Yves Loude immersed himself for a long time with Viviane Lièvre in the holy texts, in the New Testament, his canonical but also apocryphal gospels, before launching himself physically in search of very particular representations of the Virgin. Marie, round belly, pregnant, breastfeeding or parturient. Statuettes sometimes disappeared or hidden because deemed “unwatchable” by the Council of Trent in 1563.
Their long journey of 14 stations, between France, Portugal and Spain, then takes on the appearance of a treasure hunt, in search of these statuettes that must be sought in the recesses of history, in churches, museums or isolated chapels. Along this route to Compostela that is very much their own, our two travel inspectors go back to the sources of the misogynist discourse of the Church and question the weakness of the role assigned to women, starting with Mary, a figure who was nevertheless popular and who knew how to cross ages and prohibitions.
Learn more :
– On the story of Jean-Yves Loude, published in EEditions Chandeigne.
– On the way to pregnant virginsa website with nearly 450 photos of Viviane Lièvre completes the book.
