January 2021, in an eastern village of France, Greg (43) is sitting in front of me at the dining table, he had already several drinks and is admitting to me that few weeks ago during the Christmas diner, he slapped Amélie (31) ‘pretty hard’. “But I damn love my wife, you know” he added.

I first met Greg four years ago while I was working on a project about men attending a rehabilitation center for perpetrators of domestic violence. After his release, we kept in touch and he let me come to his home to meet with his family, and to be part of their lives. Initially, I thought I would ‘only’ document his return to the household as a convicted perpetrator of domestic violence. But the project took its own roots through a form of intimacy with them and their stories.

Amélie has been a regular victim of domestic violence at home, even after Greg tried to rehabilitate. But the sad reality is that everyone has been a victim of a certain form of violence. Greg was sexually abused by his father when he was a child. Two of the children were sexually assaulted by a close friend of the family. The two oldest daughters were abandoned by their mother and raised alone by a violent father. One of the children was placed in foster care where he went through suspected sexual assaults by other children. Finally, the youngest is the witness of common violence at home and has himself developed early violent behaviours.

This family journey through life says a lot about the palpable atmosphere of violence in the household. It sounds like the echo of a French society leaving the underprivileged ones to their trauma, “on the edge” of falling.

Can we justify violence? Absolutely not! Yet I believe we need to better understand the composition of its fertile ground and give visibility to people that have no other choice than living with it.

‘On the edge’ is a second chapter of my work about domestic violence in France. This long-term project has been taking place in the countryside of the Grand Est region between 2019 and 2022. It has never been published nor exhibited.

Last December I visited the family, Greg was sitting again at the diner table and told me “I am an alcoholic, that is for sure, but I do my best to avoid being violent… and you know what? I miss it”.

My goal with this project is to depict a segment of our society within which violence has often become a language passed from a generation to another, a burden without which they don't know how to survive.