I didn’t want to be a notification (2023)
The series I didn't want to be a notification deals with distance relationships, in the age of social networks.
Through this series, I wanted to tell the experience of body’s dislocation that I lived following a meeting and a love story. Sometimes all it takes is one meeting to move each of our cells. But when you live in two different places, the geographical distance separates the bodies. Lack sets itself up as a border and draws a geography of emptiness. The experience of absence tugs at my belly and dissolves my veins. I was frustrated, segmented.
All the while, I'm hanging on to the text messages I receive. Our relationship comes down to long months of chatting via the whatsapp application. First, we're happy with it. We love each other virtually, we call each other, we write to each other, we get excited, we reach orgasm. The rhythm of these messages punctuates my days. Then, the exchanges became rarer, colder. Distance takes over. I feel like I've become a notification on a stranger's phone. I don't want to become a notification. I sign the end of the correspondence - and of the relationship.
This installation traces this virtual epistolary exchange from its beginnings to its end. It reveals our desires, our frustrations, our loves, our pleasures, our doubts. The intimacy of words is doubled by the intimacy of my body’s photographs. A body that tries to do without the body of the Other. A body trying to merge with all it has left: words on a phone screen. My self-portraits are transferred directly to excerpts from our whatsapp discussion.
With this series, I want to question our relationship to our body, to our sexualities, our desires, our lacks, our frustrations. How do our bodies survive geographical distance? What remains of our desires at the time of the dematerialization of exchanges? How the kilometers fracture our intimacies? How to find the path of oneself when that of us does not exist?
[Tirages numériques sur papier japonais de photographies argentiques
colorisées à l’encre / Transferts sur textes / Encadrements
retro-éclairés à LED
18 images - 11cm / 7cm]
