The ready-to-photograph era has spread the practice of the selfie, invading social networks, photo albums and digital memories of these self-enactments. The phenomenon, which causes more fatal accidents every year, above all reflects an era which, more than ever, is watching itself live. “We have never been so aware of ourselves and our image. We see each other everywhere, all the time, to the point of becoming unrealistic,” says kyiv Renaud.
Having long been interested in the practice of portraiture in literature – she notably devoted a doctorate to the portraits of beauty in Marguerite Duras and Violette Leduc – the author and literary director recently opened a vast project on the question, inviting thirty authors to paint short self-portraits, gathered in the collective Selfiespublished last November.
The duty met her by videoconference, alongside one of the authors of the collective, Karianne Trudeau Beaunoyer, whose doctoral thesis, in fact, sought to theorize contemporary literary self-portraiture through the filter of photography. Videoconferencing usually harms the fluidity of exchanges, but the pixelated and dematerialized appearance of our faces was appropriate this time, establishing, without further preamble, the subject.
A literary art
From the outset, Karianne Trudeau Beaunoyer evokes the genesis of the self-portrait, which is borrowed from photography and painting. “I received the invitation from kyiv when I was finishing my thesis. It focused on literary self-portraiture, but also in other arts, to the extent that it is a term which is nonetheless imported from painting and photography. In literature, few texts bear the mention of self-portrait. »
However, it is through literature that kyiv Renaud wanted to tackle self-portraiture, being too often disappointed by descriptions stuck in the shackles of clichés. “I was surprised to see to what extent, even in contemporary literature, we still find commonplaces of the portrait tradition, notably the rhetorical plane of a top-down description. Even texts that are otherwise innovative, from the point of view of portraiture or self-portraiture, do not escape certain commonplaces, reminding us to what extent it is a tradition anchored in us. »
“Can someone middle-aged fall?” » she asks, taking up in the literal sense, and not without a certain derision, one of those commonplaces that literature has served us ad nauseam, to the point of stripping the phrase of its evocative power. Innovative response to these worn-out formulas, the aim of Selfies is double, as Karianne Trudeau Beaunoyer points out, who appreciates that the work bears the subtitle Self-portraits of children of the century. “ Selfiescarries a more popular conception of the self-portrait, which includes everyone, and not just artists, while the self-portrait refers to a tradition. And I love that the book chooses to play on both levels at the same time. »
Revealing facial curves
In order to dust off this stale tradition, kyiv Renaud invited writers who, “in a simple sentence or an entire passage”, had “made him feel that another perspective on the body was possible”.
Her hopes were not denied, the project curator being “absolutely thrilled by the quality of the texts received”, which reminded her “to what extent she is creative, an author, an author”. These thirty proposals addressed constraint from a multiplicity of points of view, creating so many literary jewels which reveal or reiterate talents. “It is a substrate of the aesthetic of each author. We open a window onto the universes, and it’s like a summary of a practice that appears to us instantly. »
Remarkable from a literary point of view, the scope of this collective is also sociological, reflecting a society concerned with its own presentation. “All of the texts covered almost all the issues that I wanted to address. The question of the passage of time, for example, the relationship to the arts, the view of others, the relationship to heritage, to filiation… All the texts weave a network of echoes which dialogue. »
The literary body, virgin territory
Apparently spontaneous, the selfie is rather, for Karianne Trudeau Beaunoyer, the result of a multitude of aesthetic choices that recall a creative process. “When we think of selfies, we think of those we see, but I also think of all those we take and don’t show, who are also very ugly. For me there is something of this order in writing, where a whole section of the intimacy of the text is worked on and reworked before being delivered. » The author of the poetry collection I am the enemy (Quartanier, 2020) also admits to feeling “much more in control of [s]he linguistic or textual means in writing than [s]own image”.
It is this possibility of starting his work a hundred times again which makes him say that the self-portrait is above all a playground. “For me, the self-portrait is the place of invention. We faithfully describe something real, but it also has the function of producing a new subject, a new image or a new self, ultimately, that we do not have the luxury of embodying in our lives. »
The thoughts of the two accomplices seem to share the same horizon, and thus, kyiv Renaud reformulates this same statement which, incidentally, confirms the success of the project. “It is among other things that, Selfies : how to reclaim, without needing to take the words of others, our relationship to ourselves. »
Added to the texts is the work of Kaël Mercader, who was inspired by these self-portraits to produce fourteen illustrations, giving his art all the freedom that a constraint can paradoxically express. “He did not want to know the real faces, but rather to draw inspiration from the texts to bring out a few flashy metaphors or key moments to create portraits. »
Unlike frozen portraits, these illustrations, like many literary self-portraits, reflect a temporality, a movement. An idea that Karianne Trudeau Beaunoyer pursued in her creation. “I wanted a text which reflects the potential for metamorphoses, where the image never quite sticks to ourselves, where there is a perpetual movement that a frozen image cannot convey. . »
These moving and free descriptions update a symbolism that the portrait has long carried and that kyiv Renaud reminds us of. “The portrait always refers a little to death, because we take a photo for memory, to remember what was and what is no longer. » Selfies is certainly a memory, but it is above all a path that emerges from a literary landscape frozen in its ancestral furrows. Like the reinvented self-portrait of a new century.