The Bleeding Share

In 2014, I started an immersive photographic work about cockfighting in French Polynesia , and more specifically, in the Leeward islands where cockfighting is perfectly legal with regard to an age-long uninterrupted tradition. Beyond its undeniable documentary scope, the  "Bleeding Share"  series testifies to the clashing encounter between a  distinctly male Polynesian world and a woman hailing from elsewhere. This work equally shows the merging of both male and female archaic visions, their common sacrificial and bleeding share. For the past four years, I have relentlessly been questioning the strangely - and oftentimes indistinguishably - close ties between love and fear and violence and the blunt, the blood and the sacred as well as the codes of this fierce clan which I have learnt to love. From one image to the other, while exercising my stare, I strive to map out intimate scores and both tender and intense sublimations which can have the comforting virtues or the ontological implications of encounter and the test of time. And there always remains the need to fully grasp the relationships of sameness and heterogeneousness with this strange world that questions me, while also putting me to the test and moving me. And keeps me alive. Amid those men and roosters, I link up with the archaic and unspeakable part of myself, a dimension that I ceaselessly wish to actualize in the field of the contemporary as I try to say something about it that could relate to the human as well as aim at the universality of art. Much more than a consolation, it is a strong requirement. Far from insular or moral narrowness, far from intimate alienations or imaginary fears is the longing to close up to the oceanian world through the intermediary of the womb.