CHAPTER 1 : RASSEMBLER LES FRAGMENTS DE SOI
Devenir Chair (Becoming Flesh) is a personal photographic series and installation project using my body as both subject and material. It explores how cultural norms inscribe themselves into our bodies and shape our relationship to ourselves; it takes as its starting point my own bodily experience. The project unfolds across four chapters.
The first chapter, Rassembler les Fragments de Soi (Gathering the Fragments of Yourself) explores the transformation of my bodily experience during adolescence: a feeling of dispossession. My body suddenly became public, an object of gazes and comments, ceasing to fully belong to me. This body, nude, fragmented, transformed into an object, translates what I felt: no longer inhabiting my body from within. I place these fragments in urban space, a space constructed and shaped by human hands, to symbolise the social injunctions that traversed my most intimate bodily space, turning my body into an object to be evaluated, modified and regulated.
By photographing my bodily fragments in public space, I revisit these sensations through my adult gaze and render them visible. This practice is for me a space of resistance and reappropriation.