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. The project begins with a question: can photography transform the way we inhabit our own bodies? It explores how cultural norms inscribe themselves into our bodies and shape our relationship to ourselves. Moving through difficult and joyful territories, it takes as its starting point my own bodily experience. The project unfolds across four chapters.
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. It became a filter through which my self was perceived, whereas before, in childhood, it was simple: my body and I were one. This is what Simone de Beauvoir describes: "The little girl feels that her body is escaping her, that it is no longer the clear expression of her individuality: it becomes foreign to her; and at the same moment she is grasped by others as a thing: on the street, eyes follow her, her body is subject to comments; she would like to become invisible; she is afraid of becoming flesh and afraid to show her flesh." (Beauvoir, 1949)
This chapter grows out of that experience. I create temporary installations by placing fragments of my body in urban public space to photograph them again. 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 become at once the one who looks and the one who is looked at. I revisit these sensations through my adult gaze and render them visible. This practice is for me a space of resistance and reappropriation.