Julie Joubert: Patria Nostra

“Patria Nostra” is an auteur photography project that explores masculinity through the lens of the French Foreign Legion—a military force composed of individuals who leave behind their countries, languages, and loved ones in pursuit of a new life. Through portraiture, the artist investigates how identity is shaped within this rigid institution, where personal singularity confronts the collective anonymity of the uniformed body.

Here, identity becomes a quiet act of resistance. Joubert uses the codes of discipline, hygiene, and performance not just to document, but to question. The military space—designed to erase difference—also becomes a surface on which traces of individual stories remain: in skin, posture, and gaze.

Following the process of enlistment, the artist focuses on brotherhood and virility—not as clichés, but as entry points into a wider inquiry on the place of masculinity in societies marked by migration. The legionnaires, bound by their youth and foreignness, exist in a liminal state, their futures uncertain, their pasts surrendered.

“Patria Nostra” opens a conversation about the worth ascribed to certain lives and how hypermasculinity operates within political and social narratives. In the tension between strength and vulnerability, Joubert reveals the humanity within a community whose sense of belonging is still being negotiated.