Missing figures for The End of the World (2012)

When I photograph, I capture my own loss. From the moment the shutter is released, our image no longer belongs to us: akin to a small death, it marks the end of a world. The art of portraiture has, since its origins, been intimately bound to the funerary; the appearance remains, yet the being is absent. All that endures are archetypes and mysticism.
My contribution to the collective exhibition The End of the World (December 2012) was rooted in this symbolic reflection. On one side, my stage performance embodied a soldier in the midst of a warlike apocalypse: a silent scream, a tense body, while a couple danced the tango on the edge of the abyss. On the other, the series Figures Absentes depicted, full-length, the seven figures of the Apocalypse: performers made up as zombies, frozen in mid-leap, set against backgrounds of explosions created in the studio from debris and pulverised materials.