My paternal grandmother, born in Nord-Pas de Calais like generations before her, now lives in the suburbs of Lille. At the age of forty-five, after more than twenty-five years of marriage, “Gigi” ran away from her husband of Algerian origin. Both ran bars and discotheques around Europe as well as a brothel in Aix-la-Chapelle. This woman whom I first met when I was twenty-three has always been an enigma for me. Three films shot and edited in Super 8 and 16mm present multiple chapters revealing the main character: fragments of images for fragments of lives – her words, her hoarse, asthmatic voice, broken up into continuous breath and words – punctuate the installation titled La Renardière. The image is all grain. The film reacts like flesh. It suffers, it is alive, it is worked, it is reworked, it takes a real hammering. Celluloid like a bit of life, a piece of life. A deliberately or accidentally tortured body. A forbidden and passionate body becomes pernicious, almost blasphemous. This dichotomy between the modest beauty in the private sphere and the public body is a source of astonishment and fascination. A catalogue of life that I dissect like a body, bit by bit, a series of images in matter. A catalogue of life that I metaphorically reel off, in a descriptive list, as would an involved, subjective and personally moved investigator.