Positioning themselves between a societal and media criticism, Zoé Aubry’s research-based projects are articulated around the problematic of visualization modes and the transformation of perception formats questioning uses and gestures relative to the erased names victims of systemic and structural murders. Damaged, the anti-pictures of which she makes use, act, activate, arm, suture, recompose themselves in a collective movement. Investigating macho, state and media violence, her approach is built on a relationship between societal phenomena and individual experiences, creating spaces of confrontation.
The press clippings collected for UNKNOWN NAMES predominantly feature images showing the previous accomplices in these murders, as in most cases they were warned in advance : the police and justice authorities intervening at the scene of the crime after the fact. The result of a performative process of degradation and revenge, the prints undergo atrocities similar to those caused to the victims.
Like ESTELLE VENEUT - BADR SMATI in the first serie, the works in REPRODUCTION. SUTURES. degrade themselves as they are shown. Within this project, a place is given to the victims made invisible by the Western re-appropriation of the term femicide by white feminists, who defined it according to their own reality by reducing it to conjugal murder cis hetero by a partner or ex-partner.
#INGRID is a work that critically examines our digital attention economies and their effects. The work refers directly to the femicide of Ingrid Escamilla Vargas, a Mexican woman who was brutally murdered by her husband. Rejecting the voyeurism encouraged by photographs of violence published by the tabloid press, this project embodies the use of images as a popular and collective weapon. In a participatory gesture to make these macabre images disappear from the flow of social networks, Internet users all over the world massively posted photographs of peaceful lakes, sunsets and fields of flowers under the hashtag #IngridEscamillaVargas.
