I produced my earliest performances before a video camera, during a residency at Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto (2002, Biella, Italy). I called these experimentations filmed exercises. In the first one, I wrapped my head in paper and attached a weighted brush to one of my fingers; from this uncomfortable position, I formulated a sort of creative test. I performed this action exactly as it is shown – that is, without seeing what I was doing, motivated solely by the need to put an intuitive question into practice: to exert myself concretely against constraints and wonder what this situation would be likely to produce. As I repeated the gesture – depriving myself of sight, divesting myself of my abilities, disappearing under the encumbrance and the mask that it created – a figure began to emerge.

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I had already produced a number of projects in contact with different human realities: in a religious community (Dévoilements), with blind people (Colin-maillard), with women working in private homes (Beyond the Call of Duty) – and I was starting a new one with workers in a textile factory (8 x 5 x 363 + 1). Up to then, I had regarded my work as an exploration focusing on the world of the other. But my “foreign” presence as an artist aroused a mutual curiosity. “How can my job and my life be sources of inspiration for you?” they asked. I realized that the other was me – or, rather, through the figure that I represented, the other was art, as an undefined and unknown space, particularly in contexts in which the art project emerged from encounters and their reciprocity, and from what they could produce that was unexpected. So, what did art then become? And creation? What was their field?

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Performance enabled me to articulate this reflection in a different way by materializing conditions of creation and the work that underlies it: leaving one’s self, shifting focus, groping, experiencing foreignness/otherness, listening, abandonment, solitude, risk, commitment, beginning again, openness.