Artist’s statement :

For almost fourteen years now, the question of integration has been one of the subjects that has often challenged me. To be able to integrate, it seems to me that one has to take cuttings from one’s roots but also that the ground in which one is going to plant them is fertile. These are necessary conditions to take root elsewhere again in the hope that these cuttings will develop into solid trees. 

In a multidisciplinary approach, I have often asked myself, how do we get there? To be part of another life? Of another society? To change community? To find a new one? What do you leave behind? 

What do you lose? How does one live with the essential aspects of life?  

To leave, to stay, home, absence, family, refuge, parents, friendship, rupture, root, homeland, loss, language, smell, integration, distance, memory, solitude, object, to speak, relationship, to listen, to understand, to taste, to hear, to travel, to be born, to stay, to die, etc.  

What do the words mean? What are their stories? Their experiences?   

What is the experience and the feeling of each person in relation to these words? How could a human being live without his roots? Would there be anything left of us without our roots?  

Leaving, arriving, saying goodbye and hoping have been part of my life for over thirteen years. In the installation I present to you, I seek to highlight the missing parts of the life of each person who has one day decided or been forced to decide to leave their home, to start over somewhere else from scratch.   

I tear pieces of fabric from a fabric pile, I pass them to the sewing machine. The speed of the machine, the noise of the machine, creates a state of anxiety and sometimes stress. Through this repetitive gesture, I try to find and reconnect with the moments of lack of communication, the feeling of being incompetent during which I have tried to find my place since my arrival in my adoptive country. 

A repetitive gesture that refers to the feeling of being an outsider. 

Then I sew these pieces together. The result is an installation.

Through this performance, I wish to share with the public the search and the approach of each individual in his personal trajectory in order to make a place for himself in a place, in a city, in a country that were not his own at the beginning.