Interview with Natasha Marie Llorens for The Exposed Suture, Rond-Point Projects, Marseilles, FR

 

Q:
Who are the victims in this work? The voice? The cars? The emaciated one? How do you conceive of their victimhood?

 

A:
I like to think of them as three different characters telling a story about the difficulty of witnessing someone else’s trauma and the solitary experience of suffering. At times the characters overlap with one another, although they are ultimately on different orbits.

I think of the voice as the central figure – she articulates her specific, first-hand experience of being damaged by various external conditions in her life; the ‘witness’ is the second character who draws blind contours in the junkyard; and the nude woman is a symbol for all that we project on victims through the act of empathy. She’s calm and detached, reflecting an uncrossable bridge between two people. Her emaciated figure mirrors the hard edges of the abandoned vehicles around her, and somehow I think of her as embodying the definition of victim, in that she is an object of neglect and deprivation. She is unclothed, having lost any identifying particulars and context.

The character who you might describe as the real victim – the voice – is surprisingly unsentimental about her repeated damage. She doesn’t seem to identify with the label of victim for herself, which further asserts this label as a projection and objectification.

 

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Q:
I am struck by both the choice of model and the kinds of violence the voice describes suffering. There is something abstract about violence in these representations that feels ahistorical, alienated from race or class although not from gender. Can you reflect on this?

 

A:
I think part of that is because the speaker’s race and economic status is anonymous but her voice identifies her as female.

The viewer in the junkyard is white, and it’s as if she is projecting her own racial identity onto the nude body. Violence becomes a blank slate that is projected upon by the witnesses of violence. This is the dark side of empathy – that we always carry our own lenses and subjectivities with us when approaching someone else’s pain. It makes me think of media thresholds for violence and the way that white pain is given more airtime.

The perspective of the narrator (the voice) is that her own vulnerability and optimism has somehow led to her being damaged. In a way, her innocence led her on a track toward violence and the key to avoiding pain is to rid herself of innocence. She speaks of the pitfalls of neediness, concluding that her natural desire to seek help is only an invitation, and if people feel burdened by that, it is up to them to protect themselves.

Some of the themes running through the work speak to the same story we’ve been led to internalize as women – that female innocence and openness are valuable natural resources to be exploited.

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Jody Wood with NM Llorens