FENDU/E (SIGNED AND NUMBERED, edt of 7)

Bastien Deschamps
FENDU/E (SIGNED AND NUMBERED, edt of 7)

Photographs: Bastien Deschamps

Text: Aurore Matsa

Publisher: Self-published

82 pages

Price: 2000 €

Comments: In a tied wood box, 30,5 x 23,5 x 6 cm, cyanotype. 21 typewritten poems and 22 original toned cyanotypes. Edition of 7 + 2 artist's proof. Text in French. Signed by Aurore Matsa and Bastien Deschamps.

It often takes years, even decades, for repressed memories of incest to surface. The pain is there, the fracture sensitive, but the body remembers without the mind being able to remember. We make clumsy progress on the shifting ground of the fragmented self. The cracks in the ice run deep. Sometimes the snow covers them with a soft mantle. Sometimes not. Everywhere crevasses lie in wait for the unwary walker.

Aurore Matsa's poems resonate with Bastien Deschamps' photos, guiding us along this tortuous path. The texts, in both free and fixed forms, are taken from fifteen years of intimate exploration. Written yesterday and a long time ago, they are intended to convey, sometimes awkwardly, always honestly, this path made up of will and despair.

The photos are moments captured during a (long) wander around Lake Baikal, the lake known in Russia as "Grandfather Baikal". Seeking to render textures, concentrating on the minute and the detailed, these shots explore the abyss revealed in the cracks, rather than the gigantism of the deepest lake in the world. For a moment, they capture the movements of the water that has become ice, the apparent cracks that reflect the subterranean oscillations of this sacred 25-million-year-old monster.

The fruit of a chance encounter, but also of evidence, this mnemonic-poetic object is a pilgrimage.

By tracing the traces of suffering, from break to break, he seeks to put down on paper the moving, the unknown, the elusive, to bring it to the surface in order to make it intelligible.

- Translated text from artist's website