'It is the genius proper to woman and her temperament. She is born a fairy.' Jules Michelet, Introduction to La sorcière, 1862.

Maïder Fortuné believes in the power of images, their ability to produce sensations liable to be transformed into thoughts. Quick, light, furtive thoughts like will o' the wisps. Or deep, heavy, buried thoughts which on has the sensation of knowing already, which one can remember.

Fortuné introduces order into the chaos of childhood, which she takes on through the construction of images that are simple and sophisticated, natural and technical, temporal and suspended in time. Each image she produces, whether a photo or a video, isolated or multiple, with or without sound, creates a situation where the body of the infant  – which is to say, the body before the mastery of language – seems to take its place in a narrative oscillating between fable and mystery. Under the pretext of the game – jumping rope, playing dead, pretending to fly – Fortuné offers the viewer scenographies of childhood which are far from the clichés of innocence and freedom most often associated with this unlimited time, this idealised time of 'Paradise lost'. The viewing angle, framing and technical processing of the image construct disturbing, disturbed images of this 'Golden Age'.

In Totem (2001), the body of the artist as 'little girl' is jumping rope, but the framing shows only her face and shoulders, and the time of the original action is manipulated by various slow-motion and braking devices. In this way, a big, extremely filmic face in black and white seems to slip into the frame and with each bounce, is transformed, disfigured, liquefied, animalised, 'totemised', emptied of its substance and then reconfigured and re-humanised. The fairly abstract sound nonetheless suggests creaking or underwater environments which influence the perception of the images and comment on them. The time of the video is synthetic, produced by machines, a time calculated from given points; it is a representation of time and not real time (the action lasts only sixty seconds but is stretched out to some ten minutes). The metamorphoses of the figure take place within this spread of time proper to the medium, with the appearance of the face of death or figures of Mannerist and Baroque ecstasy, a skeleton without flesh or flesh without structure. The image is shown in its very process of construction and deconstruction, where the appearance of a face is only a furtive instant, a conquest over what is shapeless, embryonic, germinative, organic. States where the image is no more than matter traversed by energy with no particular purpose, oscillating between life drive and mobile suspension, Eros and Thanatos. The end of the sequence restores the image in its proper speed and its otherness, in the form of a gaze aimed towards the camera, towards the world, reminding us that an image – a real one – always shows us something.

Françoise Parfait, excerpted from the essay À l'ombre des petites filles – démons et merveilles. Valenciennes: Éditions Acte de naissance, April 2006.
Translation : Miriam Rosen