Galerie de Roussan, Paris, 2013
Les Aimants retraces the emergence and evolution of my memory of infant desire. The photographs used as the basis for the various series are portraits taken of me between the ages of two and thirteen that evoke memories of my sexual awakening. Most were taken by my mother, others probably by her boyfriend or other friends. Because I cannot remember who made the photo, I am often now unsure to who it is that I am offering my gaze. In other words, I am confronted with a stranger; the self that was formed to fulfill the desire of the photographer to make a picture of me.
The exhibition unfolds in three series of 21 pieces each, plus a small demonstration. In the first body of work, I transformed the original 21 photographs into graphic reliefs so that a stonemason could engrave the images by the hand onto magnetic stones. In the second series, the same photographs have been placed in a pile on my torso and then rephotographed as each one was removed. Titled 'laminated memories', the third series reproduces the 21 images from this 'mise en abyme' again but this time on tracing paper, with another photo of the reverse side of each of the original photographic prints. Finally, an installation of a levitating lodestone demonstrates of the latent forces of magnetism.
In the process of making this work I have sought a metaphorical history. This search begins with myself, firstly because in the photographs there exists the trace of my past, but also a history. For a collective past of human desire and force is embedded in photography. In 'Burning With Desire: The Conception of Photography'*, in a chapter titled 'Electromagnets', Geoffrey Batchen links 19th century European experimentation with electromagnetism with photography. Batchen writes that 'the metaphor of the electromagnet played a crucial role in both the development of a romantic worldview and the conception of photography'. This history is also documented in the notebooks of Henry Fox Talbot and in the terms fundamental to photographic reproduction language, such as 'positive' and 'negative'. in the history of photography, that of the desire to replicate and preserve a memory, to seal it in a plastic layer.
It is not only electromagnetism and photography that we can associate in this way but the mediating substance of desire in its layered configuration, including memory, love, loss, language, representation and subjectivity I began this impossible search for the 'inner self', only to come face to face in the process with the origins of my infant desire. While this constitutes a taboo, I cannot deny the presence of a sexual life in the girl I see now in these pictures. Roland Barthes similarly declares, 'it is not what we see'… photography creates a mutual image, a 'laminated object… whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and its object…'** Parallel to this introspection, this 'prior consciousness of sexuality', is a practical process, because in reproducing these photographs on magnetic stones I am also examining the origins of the desire for photography.
After making this work I am still looking. Whether through a technical history and a personal history of passion, it remains to be answered if any one of these methods can make a memory, Exploring the relationship between the past and captured images, I have pulled my own representation from its past surface hoping to find in a trace of glue something of the timelessness and infinity of my own desire beyond myself.
The only consolation I can find, is that we share an intolerable reality in the affirmation of our insanity, the madness the logic of the framing of the camera. When I look back at this photographic apparatus on my bed, I see my misrecognition. I have put the photographing machine in place, mistaking its miraculous materialisation for someone who might love me. And I see in the end that my laminated memory does not look like the young girl, for it is the photograph of a child I have never known.
* Geoffrey Batchen, Burning With Desire: The Conception of Photography. MIT Press, 1997: 152.
** Roland Barthes, La Chambre Claire: Note sur la photographie, Cahiers du cinéma/Gallimard/ Seuil, 1980.