Background information, personal statement by Antoine D'AGATA
"In Mexico, for the last thirty years, women have been subjected to systemic violence that destroys structures, bodies and relationships. They bear the immense weight of a fate that is not a fate and whose first responsibility is the global economic system.
For forty years - long before I became a photographer - I have lived, through my own experience, in Mexico as elsewhere, in this demand for a possible commonality, within the 'community of those who have no community', as George Bataille called it, of a 'community of lovers' in the broadest sense, amorous and stoned, invisible and infinitely fragmented, of those who have nothing but their bodies to survive, feel and exist. These are the men and women who have communicated to me their negative, secret, forbidden passions, and allowed me to live in relationship with the other, in a sexual and narcotic communion that claims to be against the law, thus allowing me to generate a position of my own.
I have lived all these years in margin, refusing the physical and moral comfort that are the common lot of the good sense. I shared the existence of the women I photographed because their sordid existence touched the sublime, because they carried within them, like a mortal load, the pain of the world.
They fascinated me at first, then I desired them, to finally love them, learning to live with them. The resistance to the violence done to them is through sharing the experience. I paid the price of this life choice in my own flesh." (free translated, original: © Antoine D'AGATA)