"The effectiveness of art does not consist in transmitting messages, giving models or
models or counter-models of behavior or learning to decipher representations.
It consists first of all in the disposition of the bodies, in the cutting up
of spaces and singular times which define manners to be together or separated, in front
separated, in front of or in the middle of, inside or outside, close or distant".
Jacques Rancière. The emancipated spectator. 2008
"The body takes possession of time (...) makes time instead of undergoing it".
Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenologies of the perception. 1945
I aspire to create experiences that invite different modalities of being-in-the-world and of being-together within it. I invest art as a laboratory for these modalities. I build spaces of corporeal and relational exploration.
I believe the work cannot be contained in the object but must be made of "the same substance as life". This is an invitation to envisage the work, as John Dewey writes, as a continuum of "continuous and cumulative interactions between an organic individual and the world". In this perspective, the artist’s goal, like that of the public, is to seek out the multiplicity of possible sense-interactions, anchored in their physical bodies.
In my photography and video practices, I pretext image-making to create situations of sensory intensity between people and places. The work that is not a direct invitation to presence is the visual trace of one. It stands in the thin membrane between mise-en-scene and documentary archive.
The creative process begins with the constitution of a relational ecosystem, building bonds between the people and places. I like to work in-situ, from what is already there, considering the landscape for more than its pictorial availability but for its immersive function. I seek to deploy a space where "to feel what is in us and out of us". I thus often resort to ecosomatic exercises, taking my performers to an altered state of hyper-presence from which something unscripted may burst forth. This outburst begins as an encounter with the surroundings, it sometimes becomes a transformation, a change of state (THE TUNNEL), or an irreligious ritual (BREAD RITUAL, SABLE CULTE, SOMME SENSIBLE).
I believe in a new form of artistic mediation, a properly aesthetic one in the etymological sense of sensorial. Art must contribute in a concrete way to develop a new mental ecology: to carry a sensitive revolution, whose first throws are attentivity to space and attentivity to the other.