Corps Raccords is the first book by photographer Sarah Salazar, edited by Noélie Bernard. It brings together her eponymous series with texts by the author and poet Kiyémis. The photographer describes it in her own words:
“The series comprises around forty photographs of the same couple, taken over a period of six years. With humour and a choreographic flair, the poses always tense reveal the forces at work within the relationship and the traces the bodies leave upon one another. Through gradual transformations, shifts in balance, mutual adjustments and constant reconfigurations, it also reveals the passage of time within these processes. These images turn intimacy and the relationship into a space of protocol, a place where bodies living flesh and surfaces marked by the other negotiate and experiment: a playground and a space for self-invention, what Paul B. Preciado calls ‘a laboratory of the self’.
Their bodies know one another, remember, anticipate. They have learnt the other’s weight, their fatigue, their resistance, their moments of surrender. Each image is an attempt at closeness, a way of holding together without losing one another. The bodies become matter, canvases. They bend, compress, interlock until individual boundaries are blurred. The skin touches, supports, slides.
There are no longer really two bodies, but a shifting, unstable form, permeated by effort and trust. Dance inhabits these images.
A slow, silent dance, composed of precarious lifts and controlled falls. The movement is never spectacular: it is restrained, internal, charged with a muted tension. Every gesture engages the other; every loss of balance becomes a language. Pain is present, yet discreet.
It surfaces in the tense muscles, in the uncomfortable postures, in the waiting. It is not shown, but felt. It speaks of the cost of connection, of what it demands. Corps Raccords explores the traces left by relationships: those we carry within our bodies, even when the other moves away or disappears. Memories are etched into the flesh, shaping gestures, haunting the silences.
The image remains open. The viewer’s gaze settles upon it, prolonging the movement, inhabiting the space between the bodies. The photograph exists fully only in this encounter, where the photographed bodies and those who look come together, in unison.
In an interweaving of images and text, Kiyémis’s words revolve around two themes: the capture of tenderness as a fleeting moment, and the political dimension of our intimacies.”
Excerpt from Kiyémis’s poem, Capturing Tenderness.
‘In these times of ideological hardening, it is not wise to call for tenderness.
The world tends to rebrand the tender-hearted:
as naive, or at worst, as horrible softies. Cynics are on the rise,
and it is becoming increasingly difficult to disabuse them of their misconceptions. In such a climate, calls for gentleness,
for love, are often met with nothing more than disillusioned sighs at best, or a fatalism that masks past disappointments.
When our eyes are filled with nightmares unfolding before us, believing in a tender alternative means taking risks.
The risk of being devoured, torn apart, broken by something greater than oneself.
To be tender is to be courageous.
It is to seize one’s fear, to capture it, to tame one’s own tremors and the likely threats, and to allow oneself to soften.
LET US BE COURAGEOUS, AND LET US REMAIN TENDER.
Sarah Salazar – Corps Raccords
A book by photographer Sarah Salazar with texts by Kiyémis
Editorial direction: Noélie Bernard
48 pages, hardback
Printed in 4-colour risography by Charline Gautier at Sample, Bagnolet
Launch on June 10, Le Monte en l’air Bookshop in Paris, 2 Rue de la Mare, 75020 Paris, France, 19h.
corpsraccords.com
