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FR/EN

 

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This work is part of a long-term research into the body conceived as a site of transformation rather than as an expressive subject. The body is not approached as a narrative or psychological space, but as a device traversed by biological, symbolic, and archaic forces that exceed individual intention.

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The photograph is produced as a unique direct positive 4×5 inch print, a decisive technical and conceptual choice. The absence of a negative and the impossibility of reproduction place the image within a logic of irreversibility. Each photograph exists as a singular occurrence, close to an artifact or a relic, where the photographic gesture becomes a definitive act. This material condition implies a slow and demanding temporality, shaping the work itself: producing few images, but investing them fully as presences.

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The pregnant female figure appears in a deliberately neutral space, stripped of any identifiable context. The body is kneeling, partially constrained by leather bindings, the face erased beneath a black mask. The hands extend into black feathers, signs of an unfinished metamorphosis. These elements are not theatrical props; they function as symbolic structures that displace the body beyond conventional regimes of representation—intimate, erotic, or maternal.

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Pregnancy is approached here as an obscure process of transformation, far removed from idealization. It is neither celebrated nor illustrated, but presented as a liminal state, a threshold where creation and loss are inseparable. What is at stake is not the promise of birth, but the experience of becoming, without any guarantee of a final form.

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The erasure of the face suspends identification. The figure ceases to be an individual and becomes an operative body, a body-as-sign. The constrained chest reveals the ambivalent dimension of maternity, stripped of its idealized nourishing imagery. The black feathers introduce a dimension of passage, evoking psychopomp figures and states of incomplete transformation.

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This photograph belongs to a broader reflection on the body as a ritual device. The ritual here is not spectacular but minimal and silent, activated through constraint, slowness, and irreversibility. Creation is understood as a traversal that always involves shadow and loss. The image does not explain; it installs a state.

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