Noms Inconnus — Zoé Aubry

Noms Inconnus

First there are words — words about a crime — then an image.
These facts that I report are neither "family dramas" nor "separation dramas" nor "crimes of passion", as abusive and invisibly named by the media. They are conjugal femicides, systemic murders.
Their number is alarming: in France, the country on which I focuse, a woman is killed every two or three days by her ex, husband or boyfriend. Behind this statistic which repeats itself every year, there are lives, first names, collateral victims.
The extraction of these murders from various facts, coupled with their convergence, viscerally highlights the recurrence and the violence of a social fact.
To restore to these victims even an identity, some lines of existence, a situation, a history, undoubtedly reveals that these dramas hurt any social class, any age; and essentially pushes us to discern the extraordinary violence falling in the very heart of conjugal intimacy.
The identity of the victim (name and age) and the perpetrator are carefully reported, as are the date of the crime, the location, the previously filed complaints, the criminal’s sentence and the link between the two.
I have collected information and newspaper clippings, investigated and documented the crimes.
Suffering from atrocities similar to those caused to those women, these photographs result from a process of deterioration of extreme violence.
Three-dimensionally remodulated, the representations of space reinvent themselves.
Conscious of itself, the projective plane is then extracted from its two-dimensional characteristic to leave the frame.
By their movements, the pieces address our situation as spectators, implying a responsibility on our part. Everything therefore happens outside the image.
This work also asking the spectator to take a position, both physically and through observation.
Texts and images then become one, aiming at breaking our indifference when reading about these crimes in local newspapers.

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