Cahier nr. 12 - Knowing Thunder

When lockdown began to spread in our consciousness and our lives, I was stunned at the familiarity I felt with this state of separation from friends, family, and life as I knew it.
It was as if I had experienced the feeling of it before.
I used the time the lockdown offered to sort through pictures taken a few years earlier with an analogue camera. Looking back, I noticed that they represented both a sense of confinement and a search for escape. I realised that taking these pictures was a way of breathing, a way of detaching myself from impossible situations in order to escape my partner’s control.
The pre-existing images surrounding the subject of domestic abuse do not represent what I was experiencing. I didn’t identify with the bruises, the broken ribs, the flowing of blood. Through this project, I propose another view on the photographic representation of domestic abuse. I pasted some of my photos on the walls of my home and photographed them again to visually represent the emotional experience that I had felt. I added other photos as they were, to create a feeling of uncertainty and to represent the multiple and complex, sometimes contradictory, feelings involved in being confined by a toxic relationship. Loneliness, permanent adaptation, self-effacement, so as not to provoke the thunder that is never far away.