Vernissage “Body to Body”
Where: La Vie Devant Soi, 43, rue de Tourtille, 75010 Paris, France
When: 05 Nov 2019, 19.00h
In Western society there is a dominant aesthetic model for whiteness, thinness and youth.
I asked the same questions to a group of women:
Do you have a part of your body that you do not accept?
Is there the possibility that this part could generate in you feelings of shame, of negation? Could it cause, during an intimate situation, a feeling of shame?
Then I asked for their permission to photograph this component by asking for a discourse about their body and the relationship with this body and the others opinion.
I also asked to the participants to express their feelings through writing or producing a text that could justify the choice of that particular part of their body.
This project is a study on the body, the intimate and the politics. A willingness to question women about their own relationship to their bodies and what it could be the link between their feelings and social duty. It’s a performance between private, current aesthetic standards and their representation. A constructive, intellectual, political and aesthetic action.
There is the desire to show what an exit of the imposed code can cause in the psychic.
I developed this photo project in the hope of supporting women in a re-evaluation of themselves, using photos and using the medium of writing. This is also a dialogue and admission in the psychology of subjects who participate in the project by showing their body and intimate thoughts.
These women are not a passive subject but, oppositely, the active subject who chooses to reveal a specific element of their body by indulging in the camera and question about it.
Shooting is only one of the moments of the project, a moment between discussions and texts delivered by the women themselves.
The passage through different phases could be a moment to consider and rethink the obligations and societal structures about female body in Western society.
There is a desire to reveal the injunctions, constraints and pressures that are exerted on women’s bodies in Western society, and to build an instrument to dissecte that limited codes.
It is an instant for showing the intimacy of some to assume a collective value; time to highlight the politics of bodies, their conception and their representation.
What is common to all shootings is the feeling of degradation based on the shame of a component that is denied and it could be abandoned. The rejection, in some cases, of one part of the body plays strongly on the fear of judgment of the gaze of others.
The project is acted on the back and forth between intimate and collective; then the exhibition of photos becomes necessary for the disclosure of the meta-visual content that is based on an aesthetic approach that wants to leave the male gaze and it wants affirm the desire for a deconstruction of stereotyped codes of Western society.
This analysis is not exhaustive, despite different oringins, residences and ages of subjects. Nevertheless, the heterogeneous nature of the subjects leads a global importance and it contributes to the collective dimension of the project like the no-showing faces brings mutual value to image representation.
photographie argentique . marta dagna .
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