Review by Beatrice On 27-Jun-2023
The photograph represents a certificate of death but, at the same time, a promise of resurrection; it is an impassive document but, at the same time, a fountain of existential tears. More: it obeys time and fulminates it; it sanctions a loss and substitutes for it an immortal simulacrum..
LENE MARIE FOSSEN feeds, breathes, lives, makes her pictures by sculpting her body.
At about the age of 12, she decided she did not want to grow up and began to impose on herself an iron discipline that would prevent her from taking on mundane appearances.
Everything had to be inscribed on the altar of sacrifice despite the fact that her image proudly flaunted her will to live.
She felt like a burning building Lene Marie, and as one hand tried to get out the other clung to the disease.
That illness wanted, pursued, sought, exposed, artfully immortalized, not to want to die despite its slender and cumbersome presence.
To remain a child, to stop time to produce that disturbing beauty that only a life of pain, hers and that of the refugees and the elderly she loved to portray.
Art as a duty and the impossibility of healing for fear that a different condition would affect and take away inspiration.
Lene Marie describes the most brutal part of the disease in the inability to make people understand that eating cannot be the solution: she wants to be an artist and not a sick person.
To make a work of art of herself, to use herself as a project to communicate: her sublime and lacerating photographs are not about anorexia but about human pain, that human pain represented by the crumbling houses that nevertheless need a presence, hers.
The pain of her image allowed the space of communication with refugees: photographing is an encounter of humanity. When life is born it must be loved because it exists and even though the pain may become stronger like Lene Marie's, she knows well that every human being even if evil wants to be happy and that life is a beautiful gift although we are not able to live it and become what we want to be.
It is as if I have locked my emotions in a box inside me and I am afraid that if I open it I have too big a load to handle.
My photos are a key if there is a key, but I still haven't figured out how
Morten Krogvold, a Norwegian photographer and writer, was one of the first to discover the unique talent of the young artist and to organize a very successful exhibition; a key public recognition for Lene Marie.
Costei lives her illness as the only security because this security is the sine qua non of her art and she is an artist and not an illness.
On this inextricable datum the directors locate the common thread of such an extraordinarily conflicted existence.
In her hollowed-out body, SHOCKED, we read a biography and not a pathology, where behind the objectivity of symptomatic signs does not disappear the subjectivity of a woman, of her way of life, of her individual difference, the expression of a discomfort and an imbalance.
The documentary devotes an attentive gaze, a gaze that takes care of a body that becomes a point of convergence and a center of irradiation where underlying is a reflection on life in general although the action of her illness takes place by right in the form of individuality.
A gaze that discerns in the symptom a symbol, a gaze that listens and speaks screaming in the furrows dug, in the flesh between the bones, that the body does not coincide with the organism that knows nothing of the world that attracts and disappoints, that does not know the quality of the passions and does not inhabit those volumes of meaning in which the body expresses itself by living.
When life plays continually at the borders with death, it is not the words that are said in life that can keep one from death, but only the exchange of a life with death, provided that death is picked up by a life, and that life, precisely from death, begins to understand itself again
27-Jun-2023 by Beatrice