My work is based on sound recordings or texts, often intimate accounts of friends or relatives. I then develop a formal practice and create sequences from these materials, mostly films, sometimes books or sound pieces.
In 2018, I started to work in an emergency housing in France, where I met friends who shared with me their experiences of being queer and having to cross borders. From these encounters, I started to document the intricate relationships between queerness and frontiers, either physical or conceptual, and the violent exiles some can be pushed to, especially through trips in Tunisia.
I mainly use a layered narrative form, that serves as an entry point to a larger and critical landscape. This narrative work has pushed me to shift from direct visual representation to other forms of experiments in the past year, such as performance, presence and live readings.
More and more focused on the intimacy of such narratives, I’ve been developing an artistic and theoretical research on sexual images and queer pornography, and their intricate connections with political matters. This research brings the concept of “reparative looking”, to question the limits of representation from a transfeminist perspective.
In order to safely show my work in public and protect the persons I encounter through my travels, I often use the artist’s name Leos. I have lived in Paris (FR), Lausanne (CH) where I studied photography and cinema in ECAL, and I’m currently finishing a Master degree in KABK, The Hague (NL).
EVERYTHING BUT IMAGES
Graduation Project
An audio installation, gathering fragments of sexual and personal rememberings. Through a layered narrative form, this work intends to map a deepened understanding of sexual affects, and to draw a reparative looking at erotic or pornographic aesthetics.
3 teXXXtures: a finger dipped in a glass of water, a proverb and a body leaking.
22:00 minutes, 2 channels, loop.
THE REPARATIVE LOOKING
Thesis
The Reparative Looking is a theoretical research on the representation of sexuality in the West, and focuses on the alternative production of post-pornographic films and queer sexual practices.
The thesis is centered on a re-interpretation of the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and her article “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading”. Starting from this, the work shows how her critic of certain French theories – and their appropriation by US based philosophers – can provide a new and valuable understanding of sexual images.
The research brings up the concept of “reparative looking”, both as a mean to overcome dominant and straight pornographies for artists, and as a strategy to seek for a richer understanding of post-porn images for viewers. All of this conceptual and historical research is then put in use by the close, deep and rich description of different films made in Europe.
As a final outcome, the thesis intends to produce knowledge about the many means and approaches possible when it comes to looking at sexual images. A reparative understanding, that pays more respect to the agencies of queer authors and sex-workers, and acknowledges their formal and aesthetical inventiveness.
Email me for access to the complete research.