In Mexico, for some thirty years, women above all have suffered the systemic violence that destroys structures, bodies and relationships. They carry the immense weight of a fate that is not one, and whose primary cause is the global economic system. For forty years – long before becoming a photographer – I have lived, through my own experience, in Mexico as elsewhere, in this demand for a possible commons, within “the community of those who have no community”, as Georges Bataille calls it, a “community of lovers” in the broad sense, amorous and wasted, invisible and infinitely fragmented, of those who have nothing but their bodies to survive, feel and exist. It is these men and women who passed on to me their negative, secret, forbidden passions, and allowed me to live in relation to the other, in a sexual and narcotic communion that lays claim to itself against the law, thereby authorising me to generate a position of my own. I have lived all these years on the margins, refusing the physical and moral comfort that is the common lot of right-thinking respectability. I shared the existence of the women I photographed because their sordid existence bordered on the sublime, because they carried within them, like a deadly charge, the pain of the world. They fascinated me first, then I desired them, and finally loved them, learning to live at their side. Resistance to the violence done to them passes through the sharing of experience. I have paid the price of this life choice in my own flesh. — Antoine d'Agata