“The exquisite fragility of life”
by Abdelghani Fennane

It all started with a commissioned work that never saw the light, but that finally inspired Deborah Benzaquen to achieve  « The dis-Enchanted », a serie of photographs taking place in Casablanca’s Slaughterhouse. 

The artist explains that her first intention was to take the guilt away from this site, and pay tribute to a place which underlies the dialectic of life and death ; of death giving birth to life. A way to transcend the irreparable. 

In an imperceptible manner, and as the day is dying, the image of the Absent arises from this providential scenario. The artist’s inexorable loss is redoubled by the death echo of this site, and both are finally aiming to another will : pay tribute to the Mother. 

These feelings explain the stagings full of emptiness, the silence and the shadow, from which the exquisite fragility of life is revived. This fragility is translated by a few harmless accessories :  birds corpses, scentless platic flowers, slaughters hooks on walls covered in blood, broken pieces of a tiny doll… And last but not least, a slight breeze wich delicately move a laced dress (the dress tailored by the Mother) decorated with rusty flowers.

But beyond the tribute to the Absent -that could be incarnated in this naked woman whose young, healthy and sensual body has been beheaded by the photographer- one should perhaps understand that all these contrasts are a quiet prayer for the flower of death.