The Coat Rack,

The title of the piece immediately announces my cynical approach to my own practice: I named it after the only element that does not belong to me, that holds no importance; it presents itself as an (almost) rhetorical question: what does the (my) body have that a coat rack doesn’t? Thus, I expose myself through the glass, much like a real-life meme. Me and my coat, like a hand-sewn invisibility cloak, navigating the city while primarily denying the reclaiming of a tangible existence; and if I choose to engage my body in performances, it could be anyone. If the body is no different from the coat rack, whoever wears the jacket—and thereby the role of the artist—no longer matters to me.
Though I expose myself in the streets of Paris, I prefer to withdraw from the grand halls of the library to hide in the reprography room—a passageway; a non-place that is forgotten, a liminal space where no one lingers, familiar yet deserted. The Coat Rack is a work-in-progress, the kind I enjoy creating, interdisciplinary and experimental; a layered piece that expresses its refusal to be paralyzed into a single state, a thought spread across multiple objects and situations that echo one another. Once again, I question what makes an artwork, but also the timing of the work: if I choose to freeze time, I refuse to freeze the work itself.

Exhibited in the MAVI Masters’ students collective exhibition (In)errances 2 in the Sorbonne’s Inter-University Library, in Paris (2021).