How do you describe your own art practice?
I like to make works that can fit in the palm of the hand, or someone’s pocket. They often come with instructions, asking you to manipulate, smell or experience them both inside your body and outside: maintaining a careful attention to their fragility or finitude whist being tuning in with your own.
My films have similar effects. Someone once wrote about Rehearsal (2021) « to look with the hands and touch with the eyes ». I imagine a thread connecting my body, the camera, the subject in front of it, the audience watching the film, and the space they are in. This line of tension that binds us together drives my way of making images. I think in terms of prolongation and collaboration.
Recently I have developed a participative axis in my practice, bringing myself to hold space for others. I appreciate how many definitions can be given to the event : it can be considered a workshop or a performance, felt as therapeutic, spiritual, playful or experimental. I like to keep these labels open. Navigating between art-oriented and care-oriented spaces has allowed me this freedom.

How can you approach the strangeness of a body at once lifeless and present? Can you only anticipate, think, “learn” the movements and the langage to support such passage? The film Rehearsal takes the form of a choreography : four hands repeat gestures of care while different shapes alternate beneath a thick cloak. They delimitate, press and rub these unknown figures as to accompany them in a transition.
Which question or theme is central in your work?
For some time I hesitated to present myself as an artist working specifically on death. Partly by fear of being put in a box and partly because I sense that a lot of other elements are at play in my work and within this topic. In the end, I came to accept that it is what I wish to achieve with the work : to open up our perception of death and what surrounds it, to give it back its place within the fabric of life.
And so I have been exploring ways to recover our lost familiarity with death and the gestures of care that resist its disappearance from western society. I have been motivated by an urgency to understand what the processes of institutionalization and commercialization of deathcare took away from relatives and loved ones. Namely a bodily proximity with the dying and deceased.
I’ve always felt that in order to connect with our impermanence, a great quality of presence should be fostered, that it is not an intellectual or conceptual understanding which can bring us to that particular space death has to offer, but a deeply physical one, a knowing lodged in our bones and in our vibrating cells. As Nina Lykke puts it: “to approach death as a carnal, visceral and very material event and grief as a difficult and serious bodywork.”

What was your first experience with art?
I remember going to the Centre Pompidou in Paris with my dad and saying about modern art paintings « I can do that, looks easy » and my father replying « ok, you try ».

The caretakers shows the inhumation process of two urns. Cleaning the tombstone, engraving the names and their burial. The camera is focused on the action, hands carefully attending their work.
What is your greatest source of inspiration?
Alongside my art practice I am a palliative care volunteer. I spend time with people at the very end of their life, offering presence and massages. The values, attitudes and reflexions shared during the trainings I did and in the books/podcasts/films I look for to deepen my understanding, are greatly nourishing. At the end, it is more about being than doing. When we move from cure to care, time gets another texture, different priorities arise. This reduction to the essence is an important lesson. Which I also learn from the fascinating physiology of the dying body itself. I am inspired and motivated by the idea that our relationship with death holds a key to shifting our understanding of ourselves and the world as more entangled. Connecting to our transient nature feels necessary in today’s reality.

What do you need in order to create your work?
A frame. I work best when I am in a specific context. In the making of exhibitions, the space will orient my work through its history, atmosphere, materiality, the way it invites bodies to move etc. I enter in dialogue with the qualities that will give a certain flavor to the experience I’m creating. This « context » can also be events that I am living through or witnessing, I aspire to be porous and for my work to be a reflection of that. I feel that there is a level of vulnerability and honesty which is required from me and at the same time, I need to remain grounded and focused. Working within an institution (through research for instance) and actively taking part in a network of artists concerned with similar topics have been strategies that I put in place to anchor myself.

The installation turns the body into a time measuring tool through a device inspired by the Chinese system of incense clocks. It produces impalpable yet cradling figures, a synesthetic encounter with the world. Invoking an anecdote about the ancient practice of reading time in the pupils of a cat, the work nurtures mystery and reveals a feeling of ubiquity. An embodied sense of time is proposed. The light changes with the experience of the visitor as the smoke disperses.
What work or artist has most recently surprised you?
The documentary « Smoke Sauna Sisterhood » made by the Estonian filmmaker Anna Hints. I learned that it took her 7 years to make it. She managed to film incredibly intimate moments of shared vulnerability between women. The film is layered with an elemental force: forest, wood, fire, smoke, water, sweat, tears, lake, snow, ice, blood… and flesh, the women are liberating themselves from trauma and expectations through being witnessed. I relate deeply to the magic of connection that comes from not doing but simply being present for others, holding space for whatever might arise. The sauna is a space where the masks are shed. Working with death and grief offers a similar stripping down of pretense. In my life I miss spaces where this rawness of being is available and I feel the need to seek them out.
