Safe Space for a passing History, 2025

My work aims at forging relations beyond preconceived notions of identities by opposing systems of oppressions that shape those categories, through a hybridity of form and discourse and for the sake of a deeper healing of the world. In Safe Spaces for a passing History, I carry out those reconfigurations through a process that I’ve named “scrap painting” where techniques and iconographies drawing from both popular and scholarly references merge. By combining ceramics, pastels, painting, photographs, archive images, talismanic writing and everyday objects upon different media, I tailor the practice of
painting to my own needs and rules, and I strive to highlight the corporeal quality of the metaphysical and political questions that shape my art. In addition to this material aspect, the pieces in Safe Spaces for a passing History open onto a less tangible realm through the use of my mediumistic gifts, and make the boundary between the visible and the invisible permeable: these paintings then become energetic portals which rearrange quantum timelines to reveal new domains of possibilities, and to formulate new ways of existing.

First devised in order to represent historical feminine figures from the black Haitian revolution, these works have since then included a wide range of cultural and political personalities, such as Rihanna and the women warriors of Dahomey, expanding to broader issues of the (non)representation of disadvantaged communities in our memories and imaginations. Therefore, this series is a crucial milestone in my work, where several matters that have accompanied me for a long time converge: by bringing together different eras, various techniques, “lowbrow” and “highbrow” cultures, historical depictions and spiritual dimensions, Safe Spaces for a passing History is a celebration of speculative narratives of artistic and political self-determination, and an ode to the chaordic – as defined by
economist Dee Hock – as a harmonious and organic fusion of order and chaos.

It is precisely in this interval that I create “spaces” of reinvention for the self, which are “safe” because they offer the possibility to the public and myself of building together a vision of the world which we can inhabit, an alternative to the violence of an official, violent and deceptive “History”. To define this new history, I’ve chosen the word “passing” for its ambiguity, as it refers to both the idea of disappearance and strategies of survival adopted by subjugated individuals consisting in embracing customs from the dominant groups who oppress them (especially within dynamics linked to systemic racism, or for the transgender community). Serving both as political toolboxes and as fields of intuitive experimentation, the paintings from this series thus enable what decolonial philosopher Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes as a “rewriting its own condi tions of impossibility as the conditions of
its possibility” for marginalised subjects. In this way, Safe Spaces for a passing History proposes a form of healing which links the personal and the political together, by harmonizing intimate histories with collective liberation.

In collaboration with Ariane Fleury