ELLEs

With his video installation “ELLEs”, TOMA (Aka Thomas Israel) plunges the visitor in the heart of his personal history. He shares his intimacy, confidentially, in a fetal space of meditation.

“She who comes to see me at night, to curl up in my shadow, nestling up to my back, just as she used to sometimes in the morning when she came to wake me up too early, both of us stealing a few minutes from the day. She too, whose thighs squeezed me from behind on a motorbike riding at top speed with a shrill laugh. She whose hands enlaced me in a fight between a game and a war of who will bite the other before surrendering to the kiss. She of whom I shall say nothing. They of whom little remains for me, only a few lines in a notepad, shards of life. My absent women are around me, and sometimes creep into a fold of skin, under an over-long nail; one of them is inside me, and also a little in this photograph, perhaps. Sometimes they return to me in a dream, some of them, but I couldn’t describe these dreams.

Sometimes when I lie down, I am dead, extracted from life, cold, hard and gaping. Sometimes when I lie down, I dream.”

Extract of the poem used as the basis for the video creation.

Tour: Jozsa Gallery,  Festival Transnumériques 2006(Mons), Festival Vidéoformes 2007 (clermont-Ferand), Festival des sens (Martinique), L’ART DES CORPS(Lagorce, france), …