Lena Bühler

L’Ailleurs | L’Ailleurs (the Elsewhere in french) is what cannot be grasped, the place of my loneliness where emptiness and silence reign. It is a disillusioned escape, anchored in the unconscious. It rarely brings satisfaction because it is the result of a state of isolation, whether it is suffered or imposed, towards the flight from reality.

L’Ailleurs was a nickname I gave to my dream world a few years ago. Out of cowardice and shame, I was silent in front of everybody. My reality had become blurred and my lack of appetite for life was unmentionable. This utopian place is a bitter freedom that poisons and freezes the mind. L’Ailleurs is rooted in me, I painfully get rid of it. It is the abstraction of a space that feeds and creates itself from my fears, my doubts and my sadness. The greater the loneliness is, the wider the Elsewhere becomes.

After surviving a trauma in 2017 that impacted my body and my mind as a young girl, the months that followed turned into years. Time was suspended. I remember very little of my reality during this period. The only images I have left are those of my introspective landscapes and of my body as an empty envelope. I needed to (re)find and to value myself as a young woman to process this painful event. This project allowed me to come back to the transition from the girl I was to the woman I became. https://lenabuehler.com/work