CHAPTER 1 : RASSEMBLER LES FRAGMENTS DE SOI
Devenir Chair (Becoming Flesh) is a personal photographic series and installation comprising sound and video that explores my complex relationship with my body. The work examines the gap between how bodies are seen and regulated, and the hidden experience of inhabiting them. This project has a therapeutic intention: to dismantle cultural processes that have alienated me from my body by inventing creative modes of bodily expression beyond established norms. The series unfolds through four chapters.
This chapter, Rassembler les Fragments de Soi (Gathering the Fragments of Yourself), explores the feeling of bodily dispossession experienced during adolescence and the possibilities of reappropriation through a photographic process. During adolescence, my body suddenly became public, an object of gazes and comments, ceasing to fully belong to me.
As Simone de Beauvoir describes: "The young girl feels that her body escapes her, it is no longer the clear expression of her individuality; it becomes foreign to her; and, at the same moment, she is seized by others as an object: in the street, people follow her with their eyes, comment on her anatomy; she would like to make herself invisible; she is afraid of becoming flesh and afraid of showing her flesh." (Beauvoir, 1949)
In this chapter, I create temporary installations by placing fragments of my body in the urban public space to photograph them again. Here, the urban space symbolises the territory where my body became an external object, a cultural product to be modified and regulated according to predefined norms. By photographing my bodily fragments in public space, I become both the one who looks and the one who is looked at. This approach becomes a space of resistance and a terrain for exploring my agency.