How did you become a photographer?

I am mainly an artist – let’s say, in a more general way, a visual artist – and I often use the photographic medium in my work. From the beginning, however, I also used photography because I really liked the possibility of superimposing images projected onto existing places, and thus setting up a metamorphosis… The blending of two worlds which was made possible by these superimpositions. What I also liked a lot about photography was the almost animated dimension that a photo allows – so to see evolutions in time, with images. I really like the very direct side of photography. I produce a lot, and what is most time-consuming, in the end, is the selection process.

You work with many mediums. What do they bring to your artistic practice?

It’s a special vocabulary, in the end, each medium is a language for me. A different language, so certain expressions, certain emotions, are better expressed using this or that language. I think that in Fine Arts, you can express certain things in glass that you can’t express in tapestry – obviously. While we can tackle the same subjects or the same sensations, there are specificities in the materiality of the objects that allow me to express the emotion and the idea that I want to convey. It simply gives me more resources.

What role does research play in your work?

Research is, I think, fundamental to the development of my work because every time I take on a new subject, a new idea, I start by accumulating a lot of information – too much, certainly – but I can’t help it. I admit that this is also a great pleasure for me: the pleasure of discovery, it feeds my curiosity to approach the subject I want to work on in a very broad way. I can sometimes fill entire binders with scientific, neurological or sociological articles, poems… This is the perfect time to feed myself and then let all this information infuse. But there comes a time when a sort of synthesis of all this occurs, and that’s when the idea is born, from this amalgam of new knowledge.

You often reappropriate previous works, why?

Yes, I often reappropriate existing works, sometimes by very old artists. It can be ancient Rome, the Etruscan period, Dutch painting from the 17th century, modern painters like Matisse or Picasso, across the centuries… I think I do this out of both respect and love. It’s a way of engaging in a dialogue – of course it is the images responding, and unfortunately not the artist… Unfortunately, or not, because that’s not what I’m looking for anyway – but I like to converse with a work of art and see what else it has to tell us, to open it up to an infinity of possibilities. So, it’s not a final, improved image that I’m proposing, but one more image that I consider interesting enough to exist.

You work with the elderly, young people with psychological problems, people from poor neighbourhoods…. What social role do you think art should play?

I think that what drives me in the search of situations where I am in contact with various  people in a situation of fragility is that I like to try to share with them the idea of using art to transcend the situation of suffering in which they find themselves. To transcend it in a shared moment, but it can also be something much deeper. In any case, we can hope that the setting up of processes and their appropriation of the processes I propose to them – not as a recipe, but rather an approach to things, beyond the experiences we may have shared… – that they use this instrument to guide them towards a better future, an improved well-being. I actually share trials, experiences with them, to transcend my own suffering. I think it is this suffering that we all have in common that I find extremely touching and beautiful, and it is the greatest challenge of our existences on Earth to get through it as best as possible. And art is an extraordinary instrument for this.

Do you think there is such a thing as a “female gaze”?

No, I honestly don’t think so. There are extremely varied sensibilities to be found in both the male and female gender. Though, very generally speaking, I certainly tend to believe that women are perhaps more empathetic. Evolutionarily, this has also been organised like that, for the survival of our species. But these are things that are constantly changing! I’m very happy to live in a time where we are in the process of rehabilitation, and, I hope, letting go of our prejudices towards men and women, and instead considering us all equals.

Has being a woman influenced the way you work?

To answer this question, I would have to know what it is to be a man! That is a questionable question, I think…