This is an unpublished project premiered today on C41 Magazine.
Chochana Rosso is a 27 year-old french-caribbean photographer. She has a bachelor in graphic design, specifically in experimental publishing. She has been taking photographs since she turned 14. Since then, she has had an instinctive need to archive her life, and to create a visual journal thanks to a daily, perhaps obsessional, practice.
She’s passionate about dance ; She works with moving bodies, sensuality, curves, diversity of shapes… She also likes to use her own body as a medium.
Today, she aims to enter the National photography school of Arles to further her practice.
About ‘Miss Edwarda’ – words by Chochana Rosso:
This experimental project composed of diptychs is an interpretation of a novel that fascinated me, “Miss Edwarda” written by Georges Bataille. It’s the story of an obscene prostitute who became insane after repetitive sexual orgasms and claims to be God while she exhibits her body. But the more obscene she is, the more divine she’ll be. For the author, eroticism and sacrilege are inseparable and he sees a god of abysses and obscenities through her.
In my pictures, I focused on body exhibition, the bitter, exposed and articulated sexuality and madness showed as a split personality in Bataille’s book.
Along with body images which represents the sexuality, the wandering outside evokes the inexorable march towards death and sexual exhilaration. Bataille divinized his representation of death because inside it he sees rapt sex radiating.
Diptychs titles are from another story by Bataille called “The dead”. In this one, a man named Edouard (male version of Edwarda’s name) dies near his lover, Marie, who, naked and seized with madness, flees and takes part in lust in an inn before she dies.
In my photographs the woman’s body is divinized as perceived by the narrator who observes her every moves. While the outdoor pictures could represent Edwarda view of her chaotic wandering towards death.
This series illustrate what I felt when I read Georges Bataille novels: a kind of fascination and indisposition, almost like a revulsion about the extreme sexual practices and the connection between orgasm and death, one leading to the other.
