Festival Art Souterrain

Originally intended as a family project, The Rocketgirl Chronicles brought together Andrew Rovenko, his wife Mariya, and their four-year-old daughter Mia. During its production in 2021, Melbourne (Australia) was experiencing its sixth wave of health restrictions, limiting the family’s movements to a five-kilometre radius from their home. Passionate about space, Mia inspired her mother to create an astronaut costume, transforming their daily walks into captivating space explorations. Rovenko documented these surreal scenes with his medium-format film camera, capturing extraordinary moments in the most ordinary settings of their neighbourhood. He managed the entire photographic process at home, from developing the films to digitizing them.

The series is both poetic and dreamlike, revealing the peculiarities of our world and showcasing children’s ability to reimagine it. The distinctive corridor displaying the project has a half-galactic, half-subterranean allure, becoming a temporary passageway between two worlds.

Born in Ukraine, Rovenko now lives in Melbourne. As a child, watching his grandfather use a medium-format camera during his visits home sparked his curiosity and passion for photography. As an adult, he purchased his first camera and developed a self-taught practice that led him to work as a company photographer and later as a freelancer. Preferring to avoid commercial constraints, he now dedicates himself to personal projects. The most notable of these, The Rocketgirl Chronicles, has been featured in numerous exhibitions internationally, as well as published in leading magazines and newspapers such as Vogue, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Marie Claire, and The British Journal of Photography. In 2021, Australian Photography Magazine named him Photographer of the Year. The book dedicated to the project, published in 2023, received the Tokyo International Foto Awards in 2023 and the Prix de la photographie de Paris (PX3) in 2024.

The Festival Art Souterrain marks the first time Rovenko’s work is exhibited in Canada.