Aurélie Bayad

“Everything started one night as I was editing my pictures, I had this weird feeling that what I was doing was to rape myself. To rape myself out of the context. It all came to me as nonsense. I was doing nonsense. I started to be lost and to loose myself in myself. I was self absorbed and it was disturbing for me as I started to hate my own reflexion, I started to hate myself.
I was disgusted on myself, on how it all went. And in the same time I wanted to make people feel bad. I wanted them to feel pain. I wanted people to feel perverted and voyeur.

I sent this work to a friend of mine and she told me how painful it was for her to watch it. It was the apogé, the climax, of my work. I felt accomplished in my bad being.
I want people to feel the suffering and the non happenings. This work is not about special event or anything special happening. It’s about nothing happe- ning, it’s about boredom and sadness. I believed coming to Czech Republic would help me escape my constant unhappiness but it didn’t, I closed myself to the world and stayed home most of the time. This book is about me, me being me, me trying to feel better. It’s about a girl who doesn’t know what is happening. A girl lost in the world, trying to discover what she wants.

This book is about me loosing myself, loosing conscience of what is happening and trying to fight for what seems, unachievable happiness. A girl afraid of happiness.
This book is very personal. It’s about hopes that never were fulfilled. It’s about coming to a new country, a new academy and realizing everything is the same and different and nothing is better than something else. It’s all about personal happiness and understanding. This book is very personal in the sense that it’s about taking conscience of myself as a person and as someone else and as myself. I don’t do books in order to narrate a special extraordinary story, I do books because I want to narrate my own life, I want to narrate some kind of feelings, special mood. I do books because I like to hold books, it’s some kind of narcissic feeling as I don’t do my work in order to fulfill other’s needs but myself.

This book is also about being an object, an object for my own desires. An object to make you feel bad. An object. I was using myself and only myself with the sole purpose of seeing how far I could go with myself. And I had to stop in order to keep my sanity, to keep my mental well being. I was using myself as another, I was seeing myself as someone else and using this body that was given to me, this face that didn’t seem mine at the time. When I take pictures I don’t see myself as myself I see myself as an object or someone else, someone who can do whatever I want her to do. As I don’t have too much boundaries with myself it was easy. It was easier than trying to create some kind of ephemera friendship with someone and get comfortable with them and photographing them. While in my previous work I state that taking photographs of other people gives me some kind of high and gives me pleasure, I didn’t feel that way here. And that was an important turn in my photographs because I was not doing it anymore to give me pleasure I was using it in order to document or try to take myself out of the ordinary that my life became.”