When the 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. I used the time the lockdown offered to sort through pictures taken a few years earlier with an analog camera. Looking back, I noticed that they represented both a sense of confinement and a search for escape. I realized 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 violence. 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.
À travers son travail, Rebecca Bowring aborde la photographie comme un médium à la fois durable et fragile à l’intersection de nos mémoires singulières et collectives. Elle questionne le paradoxe temporel de la photographie et la matérialité des images que nous produisons au cours d’une vie. Rebecca vit et travaille à Genève.
rebeccabowring.com
@rebeccabowring
In the most silent tones, a world is created with images, that almost asks to be overlooked. But once you stop, a feeling of a hidden presence arises, a voice that wants you to listen to finer frequencies. The title of the work comes from a song called “Blow by Blow”, which continues all the way to “bruise by a bruise.” Once those words are spoken, the vortex of imagination opens, the lurking silence creates a shiver, I see a cautious barefoot walking through hallways, and I can hear the struggle for breath. Looking at a dying tree turns into a look in the mirror, a blurred shadow peeping through a glass door is a projection as much as the constructed rooms and the view onto a mountain meadow are. With poetic weight, these images document a feeling of oppression and the pervasive dream of escaping into an alternative reality.
When the 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. I used the time the lockdown offered to sort through pictures taken a few years earlier with an analog camera. Looking back, I noticed that they represented both a sense of confinement and a search for escape. I realized 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 violence. 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.
À travers son travail, Rebecca Bowring aborde la photographie comme un médium à la fois durable et fragile à l’intersection de nos mémoires singulières et collectives. Elle questionne le paradoxe temporel de la photographie et la matérialité des images que nous produisons au cours d’une vie. Rebecca vit et travaille à Genève.
rebeccabowring.com
@rebeccabowring
In the most silent tones, a world is created with images, that almost asks to be overlooked. But once you stop, a feeling of a hidden presence arises, a voice that wants you to listen to finer frequencies. The title of the work comes from a song called “Blow by Blow”, which continues all the way to “bruise by a bruise.” Once those words are spoken, the vortex of imagination opens, the lurking silence creates a shiver, I see a cautious barefoot walking through hallways, and I can hear the struggle for breath. Looking at a dying tree turns into a look in the mirror, a blurred shadow peeping through a glass door is a projection as much as the constructed rooms and the view onto a mountain meadow are. With poetic weight, these images document a feeling of oppression and the pervasive dream of escaping into an alternative reality.