BENEDICTE EMSENS

statement

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For many years I have explored zones of uncertainty where something is becoming something else, these

blurred moments where misrecognition is taking place before recognition, where mishearing is part of

hearing, misunderstanding part of understanding. I am interested by the move of limits and boundaries

between ‘it is’ and’ it isn’t’, by the play of appearances unfolding layers of reality.

By moving to England, a few years ago, I was moved by the question: Where or what is home? How do

we inhabit a place?

I am interested in buildings, houses, rooms as they are places echoing the displacement (by leaving,

abandon, exile, destruction, death...), as they are desire of permanence opposed to the impermanence of life.

I am interested by the way they act as dwellings, facades, skins between an inside and an outside world, places of

both presence and absence.

My work is about the fragility of limits, the unsettlement of boundaries, about the loss at work in every image.

Home is both a space and a place.

What is a place?

Behind any place, there is always a re-construction.

I am interested by the re-constructions as ways of re-cognition.

My way of working is a type of moulding, being as close as possible to the object, where it isn’t nearly there

anymore, working with fragments as part of the mould and taking prints and prints of prints, copies of copies,

transforming a 3D into 2D and sometimes the other way around ...

I am using photography as a medium to push further the mis-taken.

I am interested in the lost and gain of any translation.