Project

A visual reinterpretation of Jacqueline Harpman's sci-fi novel from 1995. After years of confinement, forty women escape from a bunker to an unknown planet. Without men, rules, or memories, they search for identity, meaning, and mutual connection. This project is a visual reinterpretation of I Who Have Never Known Men, the sci-fi novel that Jacqueline Harpman published in 1995. In the story, forty women escape from an underground bunker where they have been trapped for years. They end up on an unknown planet — a place that is clearly not Earth, where all familiar structures and certainties disappear. Without memories of their former lives, without men, hierarchy, or social expectations, they are confronted with existential questions: Who am I outside the gaze of others? What does it mean to be a woman when that socially determined concept has vanished? And how do you create meaning in existence in a world without past or future? My project translates these themes — identity, womanhood, isolation, longing for connection — into a visual narrative. By using science fiction as a visual and symbolic framework, I want to make the complexity of female identity and human resilience tangible. The images balance between confinement and liberation, between memory and imagination. This project is both a tribute to Harpman's visionary work and a contemporary reflection on what it means to find and (re)discover yourself in a world without reference points.