AVRIL BÉNARD, LA CARTE POSTALE
Novembre 2015
Photography Sara Imloul, The mirror, Das Schloss / Project initiated by Punto de Fuga "Intimacy, the portrait and deformation in photography".
With Le monte-en-l'air library and Filigranes Editions . PARIS PHOTO 2015
Some walls support a mirror.
That’s what they are for. And that’s all.
They are not expected to do any more than that.
There they are, supporting an abyss.
We enter a room familiar to us, knowing we’ll find a copy of ourself in a mirror.
Often, we even get ready for it.
That mirror is there, welcoming, greeting us.
And even if we don’t stop in front of it,
we catch a glimpse of it as we turn around.
But sometimes, the reflection has been taken down.
Someone, possibly ourself, has taken it off the hook a few hours before, to move it, to clean it, or whatever.
We enter that room, having automatically forgotten it had disappeared. We are expecting to find our self-portrait, as usual.
We are expecting to find that puddle, as usual.
We come in, and it is not there any longer.
We hit the plaster and its emptiness, suddenly more empty at the spot where our window went missing.
We think we have become invisible, we have disappeared.
This lasts just an instant, just the duration of an eclipse.
We take hold of our face to check that it is still palpable.
And it is.
And our memory reminds us. And our memory brings us back.
We are coming back from nothingness.
Avril Bénard