House of souls

Why are we so hit by someone that we lose when we do not know him or who is not yet 'someone'? Why is it so difficult to evoke it elsewhere than in itself? Why do we need to turn this event into something 'positive', to do something about it? How to show the life which is renewed by speaking of death?

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These mixed reflections evoke something that touches us in the depths of who we are. An intimate, invisible fracture… and yet very real. The open wound of a word that is difficult to release and hear for the other, whether in the private, friendly, family circle or on a larger scale.

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These first feelings made me want to learn about the stories of other parents who have faced this loss, that of a fetus or a baby inside the mother's womb. I then gathered testimonies from bereaved moms and dads, sometimes for several years. All of them have brought back to me the fact of a word that is impossible to say. Where only circles of bereaved parents, specialized therapists, seemed trained to receive this word, and to hear it, to understand it, to give it a meaning. There was therefore an obvious need to say, in a broader spectrum, without shame, nor taboo. Without judgement. To go out of oneself to challenge the collective.

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Also, at the same time, I became personally aware of a real mourning to do and something to 'transform'. Whether it is in the miscarriage or in the loss of a baby in utero, everyone has relayed to me this mourning of a “someone” for whom many things had often been projected very early; memories to live and share together. And as strange as it may sound, even in an early miscarriage, this sensation was expressed in most cases. In both, the woman's body marked by a presence, even a short one, gave me the desire to create a space for this indelible mark to keep, and to show.

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When I decided to end the interviews by taking a photograph of the woman's belly, I wanted, through this volume imposing itself in a tight frame to the image, to show this "trace" that we keep. in itself, which could not come out of itself, and which nevertheless remains, time passing, indelible. A form of ghostly abstraction which suddenly takes up all the space that can be observed. Of a story that opens and unfolds, of an intimate fracture that is expressed and that reveals itself to be fruitful for something else.

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Because this bereavement in which parents are inevitably plunged, is often experienced very differently by very close relatives, professional entourage or friends. The baby could not be presented, seen or fully formed in everything that would make him a human being; there is a real shock between the feelings of the parents, who have nourished the arrival of this baby for more or less a long time and are confronted with emptiness, with the absence, in relation to the feelings of external people, for whom this awareness does not exist. is not made concretely and whose body has not been impacted. There is a non-event for relatives, the meeting of the dead child taking place in a very restricted circle which is not a social event. Neither his life nor his death being.

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The photographic process and these reflections gave me the desire to work around this word to be received , this path of mourning to be started by the parents, to manage, despite everything, to come out with something; of this path of understanding on the part of society without erasing the event or their parenthood. All, were in a 'becoming parents', had started this process of parenting. What interests me is to put all of us face to face with their words, face this part of themselves which is in mourning, face these bellies impregnated not with something "false" or with something. lambda event and, through their work of mourning and resilience, to question ourselves on the need for evolution in our relationship to these early deaths.

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This exhibition is a desire to enter into a dialogue with the visitor, to open up to the self of each and to ask the question of intimacy within the collective.