Title: Alors que je mourais...
Photographer(s): Paolo Pellegrin
Writer(s): Paolo Pellegrin
Designer(s): Mario Peliti
Publisher(s): Actes Sud, Arles, French
Year: 2007
Print run:
Language(s): French
Size: 24,5 x 30,5 cm
Binding: Hardcover
Edition: 2nd Actes Sud,Arles,French ,2008
Print: Wachter, Bonnigheim, Germay
Nation(s) and year(s) of Protest: World,1998-2007
ISBN: 978-2742770137
"When I am working, so I am exposed to the suffering of others, their losses, sometimes their deaths, I feel that I am serving as a witness. I feel that my role - my responsibility - is to create an archive of our collective memory. I think this is partly due to a sense of responsibility. Maybe we will only realise that these people exist in their moment of suffering and that moment will invalidate our excuse. We won't be able to say one day: we didn't know. I also feel that in this space, so delicate and fragile, which encircles death, a space in which I have, sometimes at the same time, the privilege and the misfortune to enter, there is the possibility of an encounter with the other that goes beyond, in a way, words, cultures, differences. For a moment we are naked in front of each other, naked in front of the act and the mystery of death. In that moment, I feel that I am looking at something that I cannot quite see, but which is looking at me. It is in this exchange that we can experience what is both universal and deeply intimate. In the death of the other, there is a loss that belongs to us all.
Paolo Pellegrin, 2007.