Lucille Durez: Statues, Bodies, and the Politics of Visibility – Why Monumentality Still Matters

The power of statues lies in their resemblance to us. Any human body could be cast in stone or bronze. Yet, as Judith Butler reminds us, for a body to be monumentalized it must first matter

From Butler to Preciado: How “Mattering” Becomes a Political Act

Paul B. Preciado’s Dysphoria Mundi extends Butler’s insight: statues do more than depict bodies; they select them. By elevating certain figures into permanence, monuments declare which lives are honorable, beautiful, and worthy of collective memory. Historically, that privilege has belonged to white, masculine, cisgender, able-bodied subjects—bodies that conform to dominant norms.

Global Dysphoria and the Struggle for Embodied Diversity

Preciado argues that we inhabit a regime of global dysphoria—an all-pervasive malaise enforced by colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist standards of gender, sexuality, and health. To “matter” under such a regime is never neutral; it is politically granted visibility, memory, and public space.

Reclaiming the Frame: A Photo Series Centered on Marginalized Bodies

This photo series stems from that theoretical ground. It investigates the mechanics of visibility: who is seen, who is erased, and why. Each image reclaims space for bodies long kept outside the monumental frame—bodies marked by age, disability, gender non-conformity, or social marginalization.

Plaster as Radical Medium: From Classical Ideal to Tactile Reality

Plaster, raw and mineral, replaces marble’s seamless perfection. It magnifies imperfections—every curve, crack, and texture. The cast becomes a second skin, a fossil of presence. Monumentality here is fragile, partial, and profoundly human.

Heavy Yet Light: The Visual Grammar of Impermanence

These bodies resist tidy classification. Encased in plaster, they appear both rigid and brittle, weighty and vulnerable. By employing a material historically linked to classical beauty, the series re-inscribes marginalized bodies into a new visual grammar—one that celebrates vulnerability, resilience, and transformation rather than dominance.

Disrupting Museum Narratives: Who Remains Unseen When Beauty Is Narrowly Defined?

If museums have taught us to venerate an ageless, white, male ideal, this work poses a direct challenge: who disappears when beauty and power are defined so narrowly? And what new social imaginaries emerge when we broaden the archive of what counts as monumental?

Plaster, Identity, and the Illusion of Permanence

Plaster embodies the instability of identity. Once set, it is heavy and rigid; yet, over time it crumbles. All monuments, the series suggests, are temporary—permanence is a political illusion.

Visibility as Resistance: Against the Homogenized Aesthetics of Consumer Culture

Consumer culture glorifies youth, speed, and disposability, leaving no room for heavy, slow, visibly marked bodies. True diversity—wrinkles, scars, asymmetries—defies such sanitization. By foregrounding these “imperfect” forms, the series refuses consumption and demands confrontation.

A Counter-Monument for Our Time: Cracks, Fractures, and Future Histories

This is more than a photo series. It is a counter-monument—an insistence that what is cracked, partial, and unfinished deserves not just to exist, but to be seen. The statue, like the self, now speaks through its fractures, weighing heavily and lightly at once.

Conclusion: Because Every Body Deserves to Matter and Be Seen

A body need not be perfect to earn monumentality. It simply needs to matter—and to be visible.

Lucille Durez

Art Direction and Styling Lucille Durez
Photography Lauren Spitznagel
Hair Styling Malin Wallin
Casting and Styling assistant Ebba Van Beek
Talents Sienna @Lulu management Stacia @Metropolitan Eva and Margot @Girl Naomie Brianna Toomer