Métaphotography_II (2023)

​

I believe that there has long been in me this something ambiguous in my relationship to violence: at the same time, fear, the non-will to see, even denial, and on the other, the irrepressible need to dwell on it, to scrutinize, to cross this dimension. In what it breaks of our bodies, of what it distorts, demolishes of them, of what it suddenly throws on us of shamelessness, of possible submission. Perhaps it is for these reasons that the UFC (Ultimate fighting championship) fights came to question my photographic practice? Because it is about violence, real violence, blood, the body. Perhaps also because this extreme violence is associated with the media and screen corpus that shapes UFC fighters into contemporary heroes. 

​

The camera, then? He is only there to dive back into the documentary archives of the fights posted online, by re-photographing and reframing extracts, using a voluntary blur, to retain only the energy of hand-to-hand combat and to redocument by the juxtaposition of images a form of dance of bodies in violence. 

​