Corps Propre

Corps propre is a photographic project developed as part of an artist residency with Scène nationale de l’Essonne between 2023 and 2026. Through this work, Lo Calzo explores the relationship between inhabited space, territory, and the body in motion, drawing on a collaborative process with dance artists and dance associations active in the Essonne region. Rather than producing an inventory, the series seeks to weave together heterogeneous and singular experiences of the body in their real or imagined relationship to the urban space of the Ville Nouvelle, its surrounding territory, and its history. In philosophy, the notion of corps propre (lived body) or phenomenal body refers to the human body as it is lived and experienced. It is opposed to the objective body, understood as the physical and biological body.[1] “The body,” observes Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “is with me, never before me. Unlike objects, my body is bound to its perspective: it cannot be seen from any angle other than the one from which I see it—as far as I can actually see it.” Pascal Dupond, in turn, writes that “the phenomenal body, or lived body, is both ‘I’ and ‘mine’; it is through the body that I apprehend myself as the exteriority of an interiority, or the interiority of an exteriority, which reveals itself to itself by bringing the world into view.” It is from this perspective that the series Corps propre constructs a multilayered visual narrative—through photography, performance, and projection—in which bodily gestures, whether danced or performed, emerge as gestures of emancipation, connection, and affirmation within inhabited spaces that remain deeply shaped by power relations or marked by stigma.

[1] The body as a perceiving subject (corps propre, or lived body) and the body as physical matter (corps objectif, or objective body) constitute the two sides of the human body.