Virginie Rebetez’s work is often described as “making the dead speak”. For some fifteen years now, she has been penetrating the space created by absence to create traces and imprints of what is no longer there, challenging the photographic medium through new narrative forms. Her work revolves tirelessly around the question of memory, disappearance and death, and the different levels of reality that intertwine in the worlds of the in-between: between the here and the hereafter, memory and oblivion, the living and the disappeared. For each of her portraits, far removed from any macabre voyeurism, she investigates, gathers, assembles and constructs photographic narratives as powerful as they are subtle, as moving as they are poetic, using archival documents, photo albums, personal objects, police documents and even ghostly traces and clues.

Virginie Rebetez has received numerous grants and cultural awards, including the Irène Reymond Prize (2021), the Swiss Fine Arts Grant (2019), l’Enquête photographique fribourgeoise (2018), the Leenards Foundation Grant (2014) and the Swiss Design Awards (2014). She has also taken part in several artist residency programmes organised by Pro Helvetia in Johannesburg (2013), Cairo (2016) and by the canton of Vaud in New York (2014). She has published three books: Out of the Blue in 2016, Malleus Maleficarum in 2018, both of which won awards, and La Levée des Corps in 2024. Her work can be found in numerous public and private collections.