Aude Mayer
Le bruit que nous faisons assis là, sans qu’aucun de nous ne bouge

I received my first hearing aids at the age of 6. The first time I turned them on, there was a constant sound of boiling water; my parents were worried before realizing I had never heard rain on the skylight. I’ve never considered this a handicap. Questioning my use of photography, I made the connection with my impairment: in my family albums, even as a child my eyes are wide open, as if trying to capture something I’m missing. Without my hearing aids I hear 50% of sounds — and with them, I still don’t know what I can’t hear. Being deaf doesn’t mean you hear nothing: we grasp the tiniest vibrations through our bodies, which translate the rustling of the World. I photographed objects resembling ears and used blur to transcribe auditory perception into visual.

«Aude Mayer’s work “Le bruit que nous faisons assis là, sans qu’aucun de nous ne bouge” is sensitive; Aude invites us to engage in a small exercise in synesthesia, transposing sound, or the absence of it, into images. This is about perception, and paradoxically, the act of questioning our auditory space broadens our  visual and sensory perception. “The body is not merely a thing, a potential object of scientific study; it is a permanent condition of experience,” writes Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and I find it beautiful to remember that we perceive first and foremost through our own bodies—and through their particular differences and limitations. The images convey music, the ripples of the landscape, or the whispers of objects.»

 Virginie Otth

Aude Mayer (CH, 2000) is a photographer in Lausanne, who graduated in photography at the CEPV Vevey in 2024. Her work is a detailed, poetic observation of her surroundings, a sensory journey mixing self-portraiture, still life, landscape and documentary. In 2024 the series was shown at the Soirée Projo of the Matin Rose collective, Arles. She was also selected for the SPOTS project in Geneva.