I never thought of myself as a photographer, but when i got invited to take part in this photography biennial, I found the opportunity, unexpected and challenging, to reflect upon the traditional function of photography, not only its power to record, reproduce, and become an object in its own right, but also the relationship between photography and death, its capability of capturing, freezing a thing or person in a moment in time, lifting it from its becoming, making it still and immobile like death.
I certainly wasn’t the first person to associate photography and death, Roland Barthes describes photographers as "agents of Death", but closer to me was Christian Boltanski’s work, which I knew would be exhibited in the same show. That’s when I decided to engage in a dialogue with him. He is haunted by the problems of death, memory and loss; he often seeks to memorialize the anonymous and those who have disappeared.
So, rather than taking more photographs I decided to cut up hundreds of pictures I took in the past (dissecting the already dead !) and then distributed these cut-outs - mouths, eyes, ears, hands and noses - into five glass jars, one for each organ of the senses.
The spooky thing is that Cindy Sherman also chose to show pictures of body fragments in the same occasion. Although death wasn’t the theme of the biennial, the number of works dealing with it created an accidental leit motif unforeseen by the curator.
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