Françoise Spiekermeier
Reporter de guerre & anthropologue
Sociologue de formation (Sorbonne, Paris), l'étude de l'anthropologie et des sociétés tribales m'ont amené à une pratique du journalisme et du reportage associant texte et photographie. La photographie m'a conduite au reportage de guerre ( pour Paris-Match, au Kosovo, en Afghanistan, en Tchétchénie,...), et la photographie de guerre à la pratique du portrait de toutes ces femmes qui ont gardé leur beauté au coeur du chaos. La beauté dans la guerre m'a amenée à documenter les rituels de beauté dans le monde à travers la réalisation de films documentaires (Les Nouveaux Explorateurs Canal+) et l'édition d'un livre de photographie, "Beauties, la beauté sauvera le monde" (ed.La Martinière). A travers ce parcours atypique et aventurier, je porte en moi les valeurs féminines et une définition de la beauté tirée de mes observations et expériences au fil des rencontres avec ces femmes du monde entier. M'appuyant sur la projection de photographies, mes conférences me permettent de mettre en acte la valeur de transmission (inhérente à la féminité), de partage, et de voyage tout en explorant le sens de la beauté à travers secrets de la beauté féminine.
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BEAUTY THERAPY
- I like the idea that beauty or let's say aesthetic emotion is healing energy. Aesthetic emotion stimulates our instinct for survival: not just for the purpose of mating and perpetuating the species that posed the beauty of adornment as a weapon of seduction throughout the animal kingdom so that s generation operates and life flows in time ... Aesthetic emotion is one of the booster of life. This I observed before finding out what science confirmed: and it is because I have experienced it in my flesh, in theaters of war or in the hospital in a cancer care unit, or even during beauty workshops organized for unemployed women, which I want to tell you about. At the sight of a beautiful image, whether it is reflected by a real fact or substitute for reality (which the human brain fails to distinguish), the "aesthetic shock" awakens your hormones of happiness. The very ones that increase your chances of survival. These 4 hormones, dopamine, endorphins, oxytocin and serotonin are said to be "happiness" because they are accompanied by pleasant sensations and emotions. Loretta Breuning, Professor of Management at California State University has written a book on this subject "Our Hormones of Happiness Shown". If the vision of beauty helps ensure our survival, then without beauty, than would we be? ! It is often said "without beauty, life would not be worth living". So, if beauty saves us, I believe it becomes urgent to help save beauty! The beauty of the world, the beauty of humans, the beauty of the landscapes, the beauty in its natural diversity. So, we are beings thirsty for beauty, and we are also beings of images. And I am going to tell you how images oriented my destiny. We are imaginary beings who create the world by the force of our imagination. We create our life by collecting images in which we project ourselves, we decide to embody ourselves. From photographs to photographs I have taken around the world, I take you to explore the power of beauty images and their healing power.
Beauty heeling
I'm a war reporter. If I am not every day on these grounds, the years of presence on various conflicts have marked my way of seeing, thinking and feeling things. Between 1999 and 2005, on assignment for the french news magazine Paris-match, I traveled to Kosovo, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Syria... I shared the daily lives of the fighters and the women, I experimented with their suffering, their strength, and observed many diferent behaviors. I learned with them and today I want to share this teaching. It concerns the meaning of beauty in our lives from my observations in the heart of the war as well as my own experience as a woman. Having realized the importance of beauty in human existence, I developed the project to document it anthropologically through "BEAUTIES ", a corpus of photographs, genuine informations and documentary films fixing its codes and its representations within various cultures and social groups. To summarize, I learned three things: -far from being futile or superficial, beauty and self-care are the basis of any happy existence. -at the heart of conflicts, the care of body and its appearance are a source of strength, combativity and resistance. -beauty must be sought at any time as an accomplishment of oneself and a reconciliation with the humans, the cosmos. It can be considered as a remedy, a collective and individual therapy. It is therefore a question of attracting this simple human fact into its cosmic dimension. I also speak about the hidden dimensions of beauty, the symbolic attached to it, but on a pragmatic basis. -What does BEAUTE do to us, deep within us? Why ALL humans need it? Why is it vital? Why does it make us become more human? Why is it a universal quest? Why is it an OBSESSION ? Today, the big corporations of luxury cosmetics have the feeling of being disconnected from the profound sense of beauty because it is objectified, analyzed in terms of consumption, numbers. However, despite all the science deployed, the human remains free, free to be "handsome" as he hears it. It is necessary to uncomplexing the discourse, to realize that there is a real tool of well-being, a space of freedom.® My experience led me to join a number of philosophers and especially the thought of Fiodor Dostoïevski that "beauty will save the world".