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Née en 1983 à Bruxelles.
Vit et travaille à Bruxelles.
Site personnel : www.chrystelmukeba.com
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Born in Brussels in 1983, Chrystel Mukeba has been passionate about photography since she was a teenager. She first began communication studies, but then left university to take a photography course. Determined to make a career out of it, Chrystel Mukeba entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels in 2007. Asking herself the question of identity and her roots, her work increasingly leans towards social documentary.
The series "Confrontations" is the result of a shock, an awareness or a state of emergency; as the photographer explains, "this work was becoming obvious, I wanted to freeze those moments. I saw her become a child again with her frail and awkward body. This is how it was ... "
Chrystel Mukeba perceives her grandmother’s ageing and the floating presence of human finitude, and seeks to keep a trace of it.
Lengthy discussions surround these images. The camera on the tripod was a third person next to the two women, intervening only at important moments, the moments when something essential occurred. "Back bent by the years", the worn literary metaphor becomes here a poignant photographic object. The universe of a loved one, slowly coming to the end of their life, is captured in the daily routine and habits so as to better reveal the penetrating seriousness. What appears is restricted to an object, a symbol, a body part or a look scanning the nearby darkness. Coquetry lies at the bottom of a dusty bottle of perfume...
The sting of death is not far but the photographer’s respect and love conveys dignity and emotion to the prevailing austerity and to this slow progression of the fixity and the wilting of the body.
Old age and death are realities that affect us all. Yet it is often only when they become palpable, close and mixed with the anguish of loss that one feels the urge to dive in so as to understand and try to solve the riddle.
That is exactly what this series of images invites us to do.
AFL/JPH
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