In The Wars, photographer Oscar van Alphen combines an adapted version of Georges Bataille's text Madame Edwarda with images drawn from his archive. Madame Edwarda (published in 1941 under the pseudonym Pierre Angélique) is a story without beginning or end, in which a male first-person narrator and a prostitute encounter each other in Paris by night. Madame Edwarda is about lust, power, anxiety, desire and humiliation. Van Alphen uses Bataille's text as a metaphor for the perversity of social structures, for the uncontrollability of political and economic power, and the effects these have on human dignity. He juxtaposes pictures from the decaying and almost deserted industrial regions in northern France and of the 1968 student rebellion in Paris, with the pornographic text that came into being during the first years of WW II.
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