Yasmina Benabderrahmane

Installation

---

My paternal grandmother, born in Nord-Pas de Calais like generations before her, now lives in the suburbs of Lille. At the age of forty-five, after more than twenty-five years of marriage, “Gigi” ran away from her husband of Algerian origin. Both ran bars and discotheques around Europe as well as a brothel in Aix-la-Chapelle. This woman whom I first met when I was twenty-three has always been an enigma for me. Three films shot and edited in Super 8 and 16mm present multiple chapters revealing the main character: fragments of images for fragments of lives – her words, her hoarse, asthmatic voice, broken up into continuous breath and words – punctuate the installation titled La Renardière. The image is all grain. The film reacts like flesh. It suffers, it is alive, it is worked, it is reworked, it takes a real hammering. Celluloid like a bit of life, a piece of life. A deliberately or accidentally tortured body. A forbidden and passionate body becomes pernicious, almost blasphemous. This dichotomy between the modest beauty in the private sphere and the public body is a source of astonishment and fascination. A catalogue of life that I dissect like a body, bit by bit, a series of images in matter. A catalogue of life that I metaphorically reel off, in a descriptive list, as would an involved, subjective and personally moved investigator.

Yasmina Benabderrahmane

---

Remerciements

---

François Bedhomme, Jean-Claude Brisseau, François Bonenfant, Sébastien Cabour, Richard Campagne, Pauline de Chalendar, Valérie Delhaye, Daniel Dobbels, Chloé Fassio, Jeanne Guillot, Mamie Gigi, Guylaine Huet, Kate Krolle, Sarah Lahmadi, Yasmina Laoufi, Thierry Maes, Faye Mullen, Isabelle Prim, Cyprien Quairiat, Ben Rivers, Ludivine Sibelle, Emilia Stocchi, Madeleine Van Doren, Kevin Voinet.