Augustine II
Augustine II continues the exploration of the historical construction of hysteria through images, first developed in Attitudes Passionelles and Deleting Babiński. The work returns to the figure of Augustine, one of the best-known patients of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière in Paris. In the nineteenth century, her body was shaped into a particular image of illness and femininity through medical observation, photographic staging and public display.
The animation depicts a fainting body in an empty space. A female-presenting body falls in an endless loop, without an audience, without a performance and without the male figure traditionally positioned to catch or hold it. The historical gesture of hysteria is removed from its original context and reappears as an artificially generated movement between bodily memory, simulation and digital reconstruction.
The low-angle perspective, as if the body were suspended above the viewer on a sheet of glass, refers both to historical photographic experiments involving symptomatic falling and to contemporary post-photographic image spaces. The animation releases the body from the expected fixity of the photographic image and transfers it into a digital in-between state, where image, movement and construction become inseparably intertwined. The body no longer appears as an object subjected to a controlling gaze, but as an unstable image figure suspended between archive, simulation and artificially generated presence.