The story of this photogram begins in 2018, the year artist Rebekka Deubner suddenly lost her mother, Valérie. Surrounded by her family, she had to carry out the very concrete tasks that fall to those who remain. Taking inventory of Valérie's life was one of them: pulling open drawers wide, emptying wardrobes, deciding what would stay and what would have to go. One day, above a pile of clothes, a red spot caught her eye: it was one of her mother's pairs of underwear, which she photographed immediately, almost without thinking. Perhaps because this object represented a more immediate intimacy than the others, perhaps because its intense colour stood out against everything else. (…)
The photogram then gave Rebekka Deubner a direct relationship with this material. In the darkroom, the carefully chosen pieces are placed directly on the photosensitive paper before being exposed to light. No camera intervenes, so she can focus on a transparency or on the thickness of a textile. Familiar forms sometimes become hard to recognise. A piece of lingerie is reduced to a line or a mass, while light redistributes the volumes according to a logic that is no longer that of everyday use. Colour also has its place: the reds, blues and greens give the photograms an almost joyful intensity that contrasts with the context of their creation. This apparent abstraction, however, never completely erases the material history of what is placed on the paper. The fabrics that produce these photograms were shaped by their uses before coming, in turn, to mark the sensitive surface. An imprint of the imprint left by Valérie.
Extract from the text by Julie Héraut, deputy director of BAL (18th).