DIRECTORY 2025

Lily D'Olce | Photography

Lily D'Olce is a French fine arts photographer based in Barcelona. She graduated from the University of the Arts London, where her academic background in literary studies, gender, Latin American revolutions, and identity movements have deeply influenced her artistic practice. Concepts of resilience, deconstruction, and self-transformation lie at the core of her work. Lyrical associations fuel her aesthetic approach, with sculptural installations that seek to reflect symbolic reflections through the isolation of bodies, objects, and forms in textiles. Her compositions embody the tension between vulnerability and strength, fluidity and rigidity. In her latest series, the tactile texture of fabrics and the energy of the body intertwine in resonance with the ideas of the subject's identity and empowerment. Her work has been exhibited in independent spaces and galleries in Spain and in Nairobi. In September 2024, her work was featured in the ISSUE16 Al-Tiba9 Magazine edition.

The series Élongations evokes a burst of self. Elastic figures stretching out, each of them seeking graphic affirmation. Sculpted momentums, where head and feet are practically absent, find their way into deserted settings, peri-urban territories, and informal settlements with a continual forward movement. The metaphysical poetry of the desert is used as a Nietzschean place of thought, where a spirit in motion can imagine its self-overcoming. In that expanse, protagonists measure themselves against the heights of existing landscape lines, tonalities, and steady objects in an intimate dialogue. In this quest, structures overlap, energy sources mirrored, and perspectives redrawn. Verticality is used to reflect willpower and emancipation: subjective signals redefining topographic lines. Thousands of kilometers away, the frenetic urbanization of Nairobi manifests a growing need for sustainable energy. Living sculptures are wired into urban stratification as binders and energy reservoirs. The light hits the fabric and the spokesperson inside releases heat. Between self and fantasy: a theater hosting feminine exuberance in its reflective, resolute, and eruptive nature.

www.lilydolce.com
@lilydolcce