Programming

Entitled Je t'aime comme tu hais, this project reinterprets the slogan “I love myself the way I am”. Well-used in marketing campaigns targeting women to sell products and ideologies related to well-being, that sentence often brushes off the question “Who do I love?”. To that effect, this corpus of poems includes 10 versions of the slogan where the verb “to be” has been replaced by an action verb that has the same length and rhyme. Thus, “I love myself the way I am” becomes “I love myself the way I come”. That affirmation is then attached to the reflexive question “yet who am I?” which turns into “yet who come I?”

 The project is based on a thorough research of all the verbs answering the constraints defined above for all personal pronouns. This investigation allowed me to discover and pick the most significant alternatives. For reasons of inclusivity and diversity, I chose to work exclusively with the pronouns “I” and “we”.

Je t'aime comme tu hais was created with the aim to reintroduce self-consciousness at the core of “I love myself the way I am” while avoiding the trap of derision – that is, without fearing the truth of what will be discovered.