I LOVE MY DIABETES an autobiography of care
20 years that I try to photograph this subject. I never even managed to start. 20 years that I turn around… myself?
The weeks of confinement offered me this creative withdrawal. Falling back on my body and its essentials. Care is my daily life because it is about my survival. If I forget myself, then I would die: ceaselessly repeating gestures, permanent calculations, medicines, equipment, medical appointments, round trips to the pharmacy, forecasts, organization … always on the lookout, otherwise life stops .
There was this day when my life changed.
I am diabetic, and for 20 years, care has entered my life. It imposed itself brutally with its vocabulary of existence. Overnight, I became the patient and the doctor, every day, 24 hours a day. Until the end, my survival will be in my own hands.
It’s a permanent, obligatory and … lonely fight. From the first day of this illness, I knew I was going to have a hard time, so I decided to play with it and sublimate it. My resilience will be achieved through the daily photographic gesture. Knowing how to change a point of view, find a new aesthetic and a new register on the same subject.
Does the disease make sense? Rather than enduring the disease of which we are the object, to consider it by the care we give it is to give it its meaning. It’s becoming a subject, and that’s where you find your own freedom.
Not everyone is diabetic but this look at the body, this questioning of its own fragility, each of us feels it.
a transdisciplinary and undisciplined artist
I followed a double humanist and linguist university course in Paris, my approach was then that of the discovery of Man in his environment and in his relationship to others:
- After preparatory classes, I turned to theater and literature until a DEA on experimental literature.
- At the same time, I continued my language studies: started with Russian and literary Arabic at the lycée Louis le Grand, I chose to focus on the Arabic language and civilization at INALCO-Langues Orientales.
When I decided to devote myself to artistic creation, I left to work in the Arab world and I notably collaborated with several theaters in Tunis where I lived 5 years. Back in France, I chose to focus on photography because it was obvious to me that my practice of dramaturgy and photography combined all my commitments. With hindsight, my recent exhibition “Hic et Nunc” at the Musée de l’Homme is in all respects in this continuity.
Today I stubbornly explore “the strange adventure of being a living being” (Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, face et profil, 2004): writing, reporting and visual work, rage and humor are at service of my experiments. I like what resists, I seek the accident to reveal what fascinates me about the fragility of the Living. In order to bring it to light, I explore what speaks directly to the body. I thus seek to create a tension between humor and tragedy; between sensuality and cruelty; between living and eternal matters because these contrasts and metaphors underline, in my eyes, the ephemeral and the movement of life. – Clarisse Rebotier
This series is part of the Hegoa Gallery‘s “Confinement” collection. https://galeriehegoa.fr/
https://www.clarisserebotier.com/
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Clarisse Rebotier is distributed by Divergence-Images
