On The Edge
Biblioteca Lúcio Craveiro da Silva
Rua de São Paulo 1
Monday–Friday: 9:30am–5:30pm
Saturday: 9:30am–12:30pm
January 2021, in an eastern village of France, Greg (44) is sitting in front of me at the dining table, he had already several drinks and is admitting to me that few weeks ago during the Christmas diner, he slapped Amélie (31) “pretty hard”. “But I damn love my wife, you know” he added.
I first met Greg four years ago while I was working on a project about men attending a rehabilitation centre for perpetrators of domestic violence. After his release, we kept in touch, and he let me come to his home to meet with his family, and to be part of their lives. Initially, I thought I would “only” document his return to the household as a convicted perpetrator of domestic violence. But the project took its own roots through a form of intimacy with them and their stories.
The wife (Amélie) has for sure been a regular victim of domestic violence at home, even after Greg tried to rehabilitate. But the sad reality is that everyone has been a victim of a certain form of violence. Greg was sexually abused by his father when he was a child. Two of the children (Matthéo and Valentino) were sexually assaulted by a close friend of the family. The two eldest girls (Tifany and Noémie) were abandoned by their mother and raised alone by a violent father. One of the children (Lilian) was placed in foster care where he went through suspected sexual assaults by other children there. Finally, the youngest (Timothy) is the witness of common violence at home and has himself developed early violent behaviours.
This family journey through life says a lot indeed about the palpable atmosphere of violence in the household: money struggle, a rare skin disease, foster care, abuse, jail, domestic violence, alcohol, incest… It sounds like the echo of a French society leaving the underprivileged ones to their trauma, “on the edge” of falling.
Can we justify violence? Absolutely not! Yet, I believe we need to better understand the composition of its fertile ground and give visibility to people that have no other choice than living with it. ‘On the edge’ is a second chapter of my work about domestic violence in France. This long-term project has been taking place in the countryside of the Grand Est region between 2019 and 2022. It has never been published nor exhibited. Last December when I visited the family, Greg was sitting again at the diner table and told me “I am an alcoholic, that is for sure, but I do my best to avoid being violent… but you know what? I miss it”. That same night he finished a bottle of whisky, went to bed screaming at Amélie, and insulted her. She left their bedroom, scared and sad, and went to sleep next to her son. My goal with this project is to depict a segment of our society that has been for long invisibilised and within which violence has often become a language passed from a generation to another, a mean to exist and for many people a burden without which they don’t know how to survive.
Cléa Rekhou
Cléa Rekhou (b. 1988, Paris) is a French-Algerian visual storyteller based in Algiers, Algeria. After graduating from college with a master degree in Corporate Finance, she moved to Bangkok, Thailand where she worked as a tech. Product Manager from 2014 to 2019. She was introduced and started to self-learn photography in 2016, she has since been continuously reassessing and re-defining her practice. Her projects broaches topics related to overlooked social issues, history as well as identity questions that she explores through understanding her own Algerian heritage. Cléa aims to create visual work that are statements and an expression of her subjective interpretation of the world. Using diverse creative means along with photography, she works in giving highlights to people, their paths and their stories. Her work was shown at the Dali International Photography Exhibition (2019 - Dali, China), the Fotolimo Festival (2021 - Portbou, Spain), the Mostra Viva Mediterrani (2021 - Valencia, Spain), the Besançon Photo Festival (2021 - Besançon, France) and the Amman Photo Festival (2022 - Amman, Jordan). She was also part of the Night of the Year for a group screening with the Collective 220 at Les Rencontres d’Arles (2022 - Arles, France). More recently her work was seen at the Cairo Photo Week Festival (2023 - Cairo, Egypt). She is a member of the Collective 220, Women Photograph and a contributor to L’Obs, Like la revue and Everydayafrica.
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