Photographs taken with Yamina, Aïcha, Shéhérazade, Selma and Rachida.
Artistic intention thought and led by Mathias Zwick.
Creation time conducted on 35 hours in 2024 and 2025.
À Givors.
Intervention carried by Stimultania Photography center.
Support by the Ministry of Culture (Regional Directorate of Cultural Affairs Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes), the State Secretariat for Citizenship and the City, the city of Givors.
With the support from the gîte An olive tree in the stars.
Invited once again by Stimultania, Mathias Zwick led a new co-creation project. This time, with the women of the Vernes weight room, in Givors.
In this reserved space, they come to treat their pain, find their breath, strengthen their body. But beyond the effort, there is joy, mutual aid and solidarity. Here, sport comes first, but afterwards, we talk. And we solve people's problems.
Yamina fought for this room to exist, obtaining slots reserved for women after the fire that destroyed the old training space. Aïcha turned to sport to feel better in her body and find balance. Shéhérazade, who suffered from knee pain, no longer has pain today. Selma, who watches over the place, loves this space where ages cross and where, between them, everything becomes possible. Rachida, for her part, comes here to get out, to catch her breath.
This photographic project explores what we carry and what we put down. Because these women don't just lift weights, they also carry invisible burdens: daily life, responsibilities, the constraints that weigh on their time and space. In this room, they find balance. They sweat, they laugh, they dance, they move forward.
– Mathias Zwick, artist photographer.
Yamina © Mathias Zwick
Born in 1990, Mathias Zwick lives and works between Strasbourg, Paris and Germany. After a master's degree in law, he began a career as a lawyer but eventually turned to photography, which he came into contact with through his skateboarding. Omnipresent in this sport in the form of (photographs or video clips made to keep a trace of the figures performed by the skateboarders), photography and video punctuate the photographer's adolescence and thus give him his first subject: the practice of skateboarding in Iran following the Vienna agreements, in 2015. In 2017, he met young Kosovar people from Mitrovica, an emblematic city of the Serbian-Albanian conflict. Around a rock school created in 2008, the photographer tells the story of the slow reconciliation of individuals through music and its influences. Member of the international cooperative Inland Stories and the Hans Lucas agency, Mathias Zwick sometimes works around French news such as during the Yellow Vest movement in 2019. In March 2020, during confinement, he recounts the daily life of workers in the world of party and night. It is regularly published in the French and international press (Le Parisien, Libération, The Independent and Vice).