My work creates shared spaces, places to inhabit built from the
discarded and the off-frame. They emerge where the world does not
present itself as a finished form but as a set of possibilities.
I grew up within Emmaüs, a community built around solidarity as an
alternative to consumer society. We lived in an old factory surrounded
by wastelands: rubbish, piles of junk, objects waiting to be repaired or
abandoned. My artistic training took place outside academic frameworks,
through experimental practices, mostly in collective contexts. From this
background emerged a way of engaging with the world from its edges,
where categories loosen and the extraordinary surfaces in everyday life.
My work often begins with gestures of encounter. If you ask a baker
whether she would agree to play and sing in your film, she might say
yes and tell you that she used to be a pop singer in Armenia, before
she came to Belgium. If you share your experience of thrifting with a
second-hand shop owner, she might speak about the stories her
clients confide in her, or about the poetry she writes.
Each situation leads the work somewhere unforeseen, unfolding in
overlooked social landscapes where culture circulates informally,
without naming itself as such.
I mobilize genre as a tool to explore these shifts, bending recognizable
codes while leaving the cracks visible: painted sets, obvious special
effects and artifices. Film becomes a communal space built on trust:
trust in the initial intuition, in the people involved in its making, and in
the audience. My singing stems from a similar commitment to popular
songs, carriers of collective emotions, which I reconfigure through my
own lines of machinery. Painting plays a foundational role in this
process: I use gouache on paper and wood, to paint the posters of
my own (sometimes imaginary) films as well as to depict piles and
unstable accumulations where the figurative contains the abstract.
These images function from small formats to billboard-scale
interventions, operating as a form of contemporary folk imagery.
Over time, moving image, painting, and singing have come to function
as different states of the same movement. I combine them into larger
networks—installations, features films and performances—that invite
viewers to linger in uncertainty.
My practice does not aim to resolve forms, but to hold them open long
enough for something common to emerge.
