PSYCHE OR THE MISFORTUNES OF BEAUTY

A TALE ABOUT THE FIGHT OF FREE WILL

If the myth and its associated tales have a happy ending, the heroine's life is a living hell. She is the embodiment of beauty and seems to have no control over her destiny. She's the most attractive soul on earth, and there's nothing she can do about it. She carries a beauty that will earn her the predation of males and the jealousy of females, and there's nothing she can do about it. But since these texts were written, despite Walt Disney's displeasure, Søren Kierkegaard's despair, Max Weber's disenchantment and feminism have come and gone.

I could have told the story of a postmodern Psyche, carefree and joyful, hedonistic, integrated into a tangle of communities. I told the story of a woman alone among the others. She is driven by contemplation of the beauty of the world and by unwavering devotion to others. She has a deep aversion to the selfishness and vanity of the humans of her time, and the chain of violence, destruction and emptiness it produces. These two movements combine to arouse in others, as soon as she appears, both fascination and passion, adoration and ferocity. Her reaction is that of her time and generation: there is no question of submitting to fate. Gods no longer exist, and the God of the 21st century, if indeed he is the creator of the universe, has also created free will.

AN EXHIBITION AND A BOOK

Psyche or the misfortunes of beauty, is a work composed of 9 digital pictures and a short story, exhibited in Second Life in a two-storey hall and published in an eBook. It is a contemporary variation on the myth of Psyche, in the tradition of the tales it inspired: anchored in its own century.

My creative process has always been a constant back and forth between the accident of creation and intention, between image and text, between the imaginary and the reality of our world. This time, writing the story of  Psyche  was a more difficult moment than usual. Every time I thought I'd finished the text, I'd get the feeling that something was missing, and I'd add to it. I added so much that in the end the text was three times longer than I had originally imagined. And even today, I'd still like to explore other ramifications. I didn't decide on the end point because the story was finished, but because I couldn't see the end.