Corpus. Work on the body, the imprint of time, of disease on this body. How a body transforms, supports and carries within itself the resilience of its wounds.
Charcoal and surgical gauze on cardboard, cutter notches
60/80 cm
Series of 7 carried out over 7 to 8 months
This work tells the story of my father, then suffering from a long illness. But beyond that, it tells the story of everyone facing the disease and how each person, man, woman, child acts and reacts in the face of the situation, the suffering and the absence.
It is also the story of the family ties that we keep within ourselves, even after death. Corpus are the memory, the memories of deceased beings, hence the choice of the black line which replaces the form. It is a deconstructed line that lacks substance, like a departing body, but it is also a line tragically impregnated in the paper like the painful memory and the traces left in our memories of the living.
The Corpus is an ambivalence. It is to speak of the living through the prism of a dying body. It is telling the story of those who remain.
What characterizes my work is being able to create an emotion and that people can identify a link with their intimate. Working on universality means confronting your gaze with that of others on notions that everyone can experience. It is also creating links, it is reviving.
In addition to this, you need to know more about it.
Beyond my personal experience, I wanted to sublimate the body and its sufferings, I wanted to highlight the idea of dying with dignity and all the questions that this puts forward, namely, the legalization of euthanasia. The confrontation with my own personal experience pushed me to apprehend a topic which divides the minds less and less today and which opens the question of being able to choose its end of life with dignity and the possibilities implemented to achieve it.
In France, in 2021, the question of a dignified end of life is addressed by a response that is still unsatisfactory and the response of which is “active medical assistance in dying” for people who are seriously ill and at the end of their life. What about helping families with psychological and emotional pain?
It is a societal question. It is a universal question. It is more than ever a current question.
Today, with the health crisis, and the destitution in the face of the suffering endured, the notion of “care” is brought forward. It is essential to put words and images on what is still a taboo subject today. Death and the possibility of dying with dignity and without suffering is a constant in human existence. Death and the possibility of dying with dignity must be considered and demystified. It is a human right that can allow us to free ourselves from our fears in the face of suffering.
Death must be differentiated from the fear of dying in the sense that in the first, which is a state of affairs, there is no notion of suffering. On the other hand, the notion of suffering is inscribed in the words and images linked to the fear of dying. It is a physical suffering but also psychological for some by the fear of not being any more.
Through my experience of change of status, I became caregiver of the suffering, I took the place of the one who carries and protects against the diminished father, by the reversal of roles and in the face of my psychological deprivation in the face of the emptiness that was emerging, my answer graphic was to create these bodies to bring the mind to acceptance of an inconceivable reality.
The idea of believing in life is also the idea of believing in a dignified and human death.