silvercreen EN - julia genet portfolio

VILLA PEROCHON, FR - restitution residency work
2022

My latest series of works, Shubbiha Lahum, questions our perception of reality through our senses as messengers of the outside world. With this body of work I explore our relative apprehension of reality by degrading the legibility of the image, obstructing the viewer's vision. I arrived at the residency with the desire to go further in this process.

This time I choose to interrogate our relationship with the Other through the face as a symbol of otherness. I ask myself: do we ever meet? Is it possible to apprehend the Other without bias, without projecting our desires, our limits, without putting the filter of our own experiences on the Other? To try to grasp this "non-encounter", I draw on the ideas of Jacques Lacan and Emmanuel Levinas. In addition to photography, which I consider as material, I work with different mediums, mixing pictorial practices. I play with the transparency of the supports, their reflection, but also the opacity of pastel or the oxidation of silver leaf.

Here a blurred face is only visible through a self-portrait that hinders its reading. There, a portrait is placed under a window on which the reflection of the viewer prevents full perception.

Artworks produced in Niort, FR during the residency of the Rencontres of international young photography