Lene Marquardt

In a world that continues to center romantic love – and within structures that still isolate, endanger, and diminish women – "A Soft Place To Land" shifts the focus towards female friendship. A form of love that is deeply profound, loyal, and vital to me. Since my teenage years, these bonds have shaped the way I move through the world and the way I see myself. 

The project focuses on my three closest friendships: I have known Amelie for half my life, and Fritzi and Liv since my early twenties. Built over time, through emotional honesty, tenderness, and trust, these relationships have become spaces in which vulnerability can exist without performance. And amid the changing phases of life, shifting emotional states, and different cities – we carry each other. 

The work speaks through the quiet moments, gestures of care, shared silence and presence, bodies at rest, and memories. Combining portraiture, still life, archival material, and text, the project explores female friendship as an emotional space: something tender, fluid, intimate, and deeply formative. 

Working on this project reminded me once again that while romantic love is so often treated as life’s primary relationship, it is my female friends who have grounded me most consistently. I know how to live this life without a man – but certainly not without these three women.