The labyrinth body, 2015-2019
Dak’Art, 2016
Dakar, Senegal
Dak’Art, 2016
Dakar, Senegal
Crepe paper
Water
Water
We all need a new point of departure in order to continue existing.
The Labyrinth Body explores the emotional transformations produced by displacement. Through the movement of the body into biomorphic forms, the work questions how emotions can alter, deform, and ultimately transform the body to the point where its original form becomes unrecognisable. Repeated and recombined, these forms develop a visual language shaped by the melancholy of departure.
The folds of the work evoke a labyrinth. They become a second skin, physically replacing the body’s surface. With nothing but my body, I seek refuge within it. I construct successive layers of skin as substitutes for a place of shelter—a house, a roof, a refuge. At the same time, the labyrinth becomes a metaphor for the search for the self: a continuous wandering in which the certainty of where one is, or where one is going, is gradually abandoned.
Each element can be worn and transformed in multiple ways. Each configuration is unique, like each day of a life: existential yet without a reason to exist; defined yet unstable; disproportionate yet constrained; born yet already dying; powerful yet powerless; inhabited yet abandoned; lost yet found; chaotic yet methodical; present yet elsewhere; surrounding yet internal; clothing yet skin; internal yet external; utopian yet violent; constructive yet subversive.
Through the shifting between appearance and disappearance, I push the body further into a process of transformation. The work gradually moves toward a formal erasure: the disappearance of a stable, recognisable body and the emergence of something uncertain, unstable, and transient.
The work ultimately speaks of a fragile reality—one that exists only temporarily, between presence and absence, between becoming and disappearance.
