“The contours of France are quite obvious”… Gaëlle Sutton maps the feminicides of 2026

Pascale, Betty, Latifa… First names on a red background, linked together and forming one by one the contours of France. Visually representing the victims of feminicide in 2026 is the starting point of the mapping shared by Gaëlle Sutton at the beginning of the month on her LinkedIn account. The approach is part of the #30DayMapChallenge, which encourages cartographers to make their work visible throughout the month of November. By launching this challenge, Gaëlle Sutton says she wanted to share societal subjects that she considers important, even invisible, in particular the cause of women. The independent cartographer explains her approach to 20 Minutes.

Why did you take up the subject of feminicides in France?

The subject of violence against women was particularly close to my heart, it was a way of showing it through my medium: the map. There is not a lot of cartographic representation on feminicides. Mapping allows us to engage differently, beyond the posters or visuals that we can regularly see on the subject. The feminist collective #NousToutes already uses this format, it is on the basis of their data that I created my own mapping, a little differently, which is limited to the victims of the current year. I wanted to show that behind each feminicide, there are not only geographical points, but identities and that there are links between these women. I tried to pay tribute to them, the collective uses the term “femmage”, I find it quite accurate.

Why did you choose to limit yourself to the first names of these women?

I wanted to personalize this data, I did not want something anonymous or which could be compared to a simple geographical count of women killed, they are already anonymized all year round, which explains the choice of this title: “Les absentes”. The desire to give their first name, without age, or additional information allowed us to remain simple, while getting to the point, I did not want a statistics card. I also chose not to represent women whose first name did not appear in the database. I read the articles about their story, but I don't know the reasons for this anonymity and I didn't want to call them that: "a woman". Perhaps I should integrate them by the simple presence of a point, because unfortunately this means that there were more feminicides in 2026 than points on the map.

These women are linked together by lines, why?

With this same idea of ​​personification, I chose not to mention the names of the towns in which these women were murdered but to represent their locality only by points. By connecting the first names together, the contours of metropolitan France are quite obvious, this is the question I asked myself before embarking on this cartography. We finally realize that the first names are quite scattered with, obviously, a greater concentration in areas with large populations.

For overseas, I have listed three first names, they appear to the west on the map. But I was told that this was not understandable at first glance, that means there is a problem, so I am thinking of a way to integrate them in another way.

Unlike the #NousToutes collective, why are you limiting this mapping to feminicides of the current year?

What was impactful for me was showing that all of this was happening. Femicides are happening now, it’s not just an archive. This also means that the map will, unfortunately, be updated before the end of the year.