PRAXIS

PHOTOGRAPHS

Antoine d’Agata

TEXT

Yannick HAENEL

In Mexico, women are first and foremost subjected to the systemic violence that destroys structures, bodies, and human relationships. They carry the immense weight of a fate that does not need to be and for which the global economic system is primarily responsible.

Depuis quarante ans, – bien avant de devenir photographe -, je vis, à travers mon expérience propre, au Mexique comme ailleurs, dans cette exigence d’un commun possible, au sein de la communauté de ceux qui n’ont pas de communauté», comme la nomme George Bataille, d’une «communauté des amants» au sens large, amoureuse et défoncée, invisible et infiniment fragmentée, de ceux qui n’ont rien que leur corps pour survivre, sentir et exister.

These are the men and women who have conveyed their negative, secret, and forbidden passions, and that have allowed me to live in relationship with the other, in a sexual and narcotic communion that boldly asserts itself in the face of the law, thus allowing me to establish a place of my own.

All these years, I have lived on the fringe, refusing the physical and moral comforts that are the familiar lot of the well-meaning. I shared the reality of these women I photographed because their sordid existence touches upon the sublime, because they carry within them, like a mortal burden, the pain of the world.

At first, they fascinated me, then I desired them, then, finally, I loved them and learned to live with them. Resistance to the violence inflicted upon them is done by sharing their experience. I paid the price of this choice of life with my own flesh. In this place of mine, I am untroubled by criticism or comments.

Antoine d’Agata

PRAXIS | Antoine d’Agata, México 1986 – 2021
hardcover
800 exemplaires
24 x 32 cm
120 pages