Lundi 09 Mai 2016 11:38:28 par Nour Alahiane-lechevalier dans Livres

You Could Even Die For Not Being A Real Couple is a nice book project created by the young photographer Laura Lafon. Laura was a student at LE 75 art school in Brussels, and three years ago, she came back from Kurdistan with Martin Gallone, her new lover, and tons of images. She is now working on the auto-publication of this book with Crowdbooks and she needs your support to explose her crowdfunding and get the money to print and share her book. https://crowdbooks.com/projects/you-could-even-die-for-not-being-a-real-couple/"

© Laura Lafon

165x220mm
224 pages
Hardcover, sewn, board 1,5 mm, h&t bands, red Suedel luxe + foil stamping 1/c gold on front
Printed 4/4 colors on Gardapat Kiara 150 gsm + inserts: 2 x 4 pages on GSK red 100gr printed 1/0c
English
https://crowdbooks.com/projects/you-could-even-die-for-not-being-a-real-couple/"


You could even die for not being a real couple

Kurdistan, my forbidden love

What is love? With this simple and naive question, I traveled over the dry mountains of Kurdistan. Everyone likes to talk about love, but who can really experience it freely?

On my way, a rather young lover. Not a couple, but a real harmony, sharing photographic passion. Quickly we had to face cultural issues, gender repartition, eyes in public space, tedious traditions. And everywhere the sacred question : why are you not married? The people we met have for sure influenced a certain perception of the territory itself. The Kurdistan of the revolutionaries lacking of reality, utopia which haven’t really gone through, anarchist coffee places where taboos remain despite the words. Adrenaline leads us, creating mise en scene, using our own bodies to recreate the prohibited situations Kurdish people talked to us.

"Life is so cheap in this part of the world".

© Laura Lafon

Surprisingly we even felt in love, became the icon of the liberal couple, and naively redefine the foundations of this Western fantasy. All the work is covered by the gap between rhetoric and reality, between the ideal and the impossibility of being. The image is then used to fill that gap. To bring out different subjectivities, the artist confronts her own identity to the realities she encounters.

Going to Kurdistan was wondering how the Kurdish people, known for his revolutionary struggle and especially egalitarian gender position, envisages love. How the territory marked by conservatism and strong patriarchal relations can tolerate these ideals of freedom ?

It is a tale that goes beyond the documentary, an absurd tale that reveals the love in Kurdistan, that country which is fighting to even exist.

Laura Lafon