My work evolves from heterogeneous contextual research, situations of encounter, and responses to experience.

It first took root in specific communities outside the art world: the community of nuns in Dévoilements (1998-2001), of the blind in Colin-Maillard (1999-2001), of domestic workers in Beyond the Call of Duty (1999-2001), and of textile workers in 8 x 5 x 363 + 1 (2002-2006). I then turned to art-related spaces, with the participation of students in Drawing Session (2004) and En exercice (2006), and of visitors in Portraits de clients (2007). I use such encounters to involve the other in the process of producing a sign, a mark, or an account.

Several of these projects rely on “data” collection and the reorganization of existing materials, traces of things that share the quality of usually being overlooked. Extracting such traces from their everyday dimensions to build them into archives allows for another perspective. The invisible suddenly becomes tangible, details become gargantuan and reveal the infinite, the impersonal discloses a shared proximity. This process restores a hidden world, a world in some sense un-representable, a universe off the radar, held (or in waiting) between the conscious and the unconscious.

Alongside this interest in the trace of things and the universe of others, I develop “performative” exercises that turn others’ gaze back onto me, a procedure that turns attention back to the artist’s work, to the artist grappling with the creative process. Through various physical and situational constraints—obstructed vision, restrictive wear, covering up the face—I strive to work outside the purview of vision, in “un-mastery”, such as to instill a state of dispossession, of loss: loss of one’s bearings, loss of control, loss of self-image.

From this perspective, to be an artist is to experience one’s limits, to shake up the idea of a static reality, to break the fixed patterns, and to work in a movement that looks for disorientation and accepts discomfort.