Monography - Juliette Lemontey

"One does not enter inside the other as one would like. This is what Juliette Lemontey's faceless bodies say. In its non reflexivity, the faceless person is outside of social relationships, the deliberate obliteration of the face distancing it from its relationship to the other. The covering of the orifices by the skin shows the reverse side of a dream of fusion of the bodies and the face, sealed and smooth, is a warning against whoever would try to reach it. Is this a possible translation of what prosopagnosia would look like, the disorder of face identification? Or the opening of a moment to the ones who would find in it something familiar? For, at the same time as personal identity is neutralized, it is replaced by the identical and the common narrative. Stripped of its stigmata, the face becomes a surface of projection, a backdrop where images surge. The memories of something very slow and silent that belong to all of us are pressed into it: a vacation love, a family reunion, a school outing, so many anonymous memories of fading bodies that are about to fade away in time. History repeats itself, permanently. Our genes carry our emotions, our experiences and our traumas and, in this sense, a life can continue after it is forgotten. This is not without engaging nostalgia. Body fragments mark absence and a poetic incompleteness that the German Romantics understood very well with ruins."

Elora Weil-Engerer