Accumulate, build, let go

Everything Must Disappear is a multidisciplinary solo exhibition, developed during a residency at the Goethe-Institut in Alexandria. Isolated-or rather sheltered-for 6 weeks, I developed this project like an insect weaving its cocoon: I imagined it as a space of experimentation in which I invented, fabricated, collected and accumulated all kinds of objects, techniques, practices and thoughts. This project is part of an ongoing reflection that has been permeating my work for years: the tension between memory and oblivion, the importance of the archive (and the absurd in archival practices), the transformation of the body and its dialogue with the territory, and the place of our political commitments in our artistic and living practices. Everything Must Disappear is a unique project, multi-faceted and protean, performative and participative, which extends these questions by opening them up to new forms and new media.

Objects in sharing, languages in movement, dialogue in action

Made almost entirely from recycled materials - moving boxes, egg cartons, waste paper - this project embraces impermanence right down to its very substance.

In a very pragmatic way, it suited me well to get rid of everything that was lying around my apartment, and especially to transform it into something a bit more fun, and then get rid of it for good, as if my duty had finally been fulfilled. As an artist, I think that’s part of our responsibility: to transform and give back to the world what belongs to it. And so much the better if we can bring a little humor or tenderness into the process.

In my practice, it’s important to avoid at all costs the sacralizing relationship between art and the public, and instead to make objects that can be manipulated, owned, appropriated or played with. I prefer to imagine the art object as an interface between the living world and the world of ideas - and to deprive it of the idea that everything must have a value. I believe that truth lies in the little things that make the heart feel good, and I don’t pretend to make art for any other reason. Between drawings, paintings, artefacts, talismans, mobiles, prints, words and gestures, the exhibition is fundamentally multidisciplinary: each technique brings its own texture, its own temporality, and is collectively inscribed in this narrative of transformation.

More specifically, I’m newly exploring the relationship between word and image, both in the work itself and in the creative process. I’m constantly going back and forth between drawing and writing, and this shift, relatively recent in my practice, is reflected in the growing importance of writing, which is gradually becoming a strong new pillar of what I produce. For this project, I wanted to write new things and play between academic and curatorial writing and other genres more rooted in the literary tradition, such as poetry or novels. I write stories about my images and draw what the stories tell, I write poems about art and novels about myself. It’s also important for me to make my processes (thinking, writing, making) as transparent as possible, to reconnect gesture and result, and to share thoughts in motion. That’s why I also write a lot about what I’m making, in words that are neither too serious nor too heavy, so that the more curious can grasp the project with sufficient keys to understand my crazy ideas, if they wish to do so. I want to incorporate a form of familiarity into my practice: a commonplace, a shared visual vocabulary, something comfortable and accessible. I make art because it makes me feel good and because it’s fun, because nothing is more important. The art world is opaque, incomprehensible and above all inaccessible enough, and sharing this more theoretical, curatorial writing is something I’m keen to include in what I show the world. If I wanted to talk about the world in a solemn way, I would have done politics and not little drawings.

Finally, experimenting with literature adds new reading grids, new layers of meaning - developing images and words together, making them dialogue and resonate with each other at the same time.

The Fat Lady

At the center of the exhibition stands a papier-mâché sculpture, a sculptural self-portrait, the physical and symbolic heart of the work and the embodiment of all these questions linked to the body and the home, inviting the viewer to question their own body, its memory and its metamorphoses.

It’s a fat lady you can slip into, a fat lady who invites you into her home, into herself. The exhibition space becomes both her home and her body, a body turned inside out, whose entrails, memories, dreams and fears, mourning and secrets, are all visible. More than a simple reflection of myself, this self-portrait becomes a symbol of the perpetual process of transformation in the face of impermanence, and redefines the contours of this unconventional exhibition, where the stage space is reversed: the spectator becomes a stakeholder, the viewed becomes the viewer, as in a kind of upside-down theater, a house, where we are invited to have tea with the fat lady, and rid her of all the clutter. And, in the end, the fat lady is all that’s left, originally surrounded by all her things, and the audience gradually dispossesses her of everything that weighed on her heart.