Strip
Rebekka Deubner
"strip" deals with the body, its filial memory and its metamorphoses. I see photography as an act of reparation and I approach the materiality of the image as a possible form in the face of absence.
After her death, my mother's clothes became relics of her hollowed-out body. She imprinted her traces of wear - smells, stains, darnings, holes - marking the textiles with her vivid shapes.
"Remembering is not just an act of remembering, as we all know. It's an act of creation. It's fabulating, it's captioning, but above all it's making. (...) The English language offers a fine metaplasm in this regard, with remember, which means to remember, but which, when chanted 're-member', means to recompose, to remember." — Vinciane Desprets, Au bonheur des morts, La découverte, 2015.
In my turn, I play with her wardrobe, until now through video and photograms, slipping into her skins in every possible way so as to be in her presence.
As I strip off her clothes and manipulate them, I invent a relationship with the absent woman.
The photographic process, reduced to its 'essence': light and a photosensitive surface, allows her presence to be embodied thanks to the absence of the 'wall-bridge' that the camera can represent with reality during the shooting. In this way, I am seeking to bring to light a form of transposition through an economy of technology: to make an imprint without a body, and to create for and through the recording device a space-time 'present' and 'animated' by the deceased.
