My Body Is Not the Same as Yours
My Body Is Not the Same as Yours
Jeanne et Paul
2021
Collage, anonymous photographs, dried tree leaves, black felt pen on handmade Nepalese lokta paper, black crumpled paper – Framed 60 × 80 cm
Like the generations of leaves are those of men. The wind blows and one year’s leaves are scattered on the ground, but the trees bud and fresh leaves open when spring comes again. So a generation of men is born as another passes away.
The Iliad, Book VI, Homer
This collage combines an anonymous photograph, a dried autumn leaf, and a text.
The text is a fictional list, in the first person, of things loved or hated. In this sense, the list confers upon the anonymous person an identity: a body defined by its tastes, by its difference.
The words give life, the leaf and photograph remember.
In Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes writes: I like, I don’t like: this is of no importance to anyone; this, apparently, has no meaning. And yet all this means: my body is not the same as yours. Hence, in this anarchic foam of tastes and distastes, a kind of listless blur, gradually appears the figure of a bodily enigma, requiring complicity or irritation. Here begins the intimidation of the body, which obliges others to endure me liberally, to remain silent and polite confronted by pleasures or rejections which they do not share.