I come from a family of researchers who taught me the importance of facts, the necessity of an independent spirit and the love for experimentation both intellectual and manual.
I studied Political sciences then specialized on the Arab world. I needed to understand and learn. My years at the Art school Le Fresnoy where mostly immersed in practice, and lead me years later to do a PHD in Arts which resulted in both a PHD Thesis and a multimedia Art installation.
In both my documentary films and my installations, everything starts with the act of research. Weather biology, philosophy or social sciences, my projects are based on documented research and a continuous back and forth between research and artistic experimentation.
My relation to the act of research is both intuitive and analytic. It all starts with an image, a feeling, a question and just like researchers, I often end up finding what I wasn't looking for to start with.
My PHD thesis starts with the notion of skin and how its biological and psychological characteristics relate to Art forms.
Credit: E. Blumenfeld, Francesco Albano. Macro images of skin, YB.
The membrane form in 21st-century art: Skin, envelope, interface.
PHD In Arts and Science of Arts, dec. 2023
Doctoral Thesis and solo exhibition, Turbulence, Marseille.
Abstract
THE FORM-MEMBRANE IN 21st CENTURY ART Skin, envelope, interface
It all started with an emotional shock that generated an intuition, both sensitive and reasoned, concerning a mode of connection to forms and matter. A skin disease transformed my relationship with the body, the world and creation. Through this experience, I finally thought of the artistic form as a membrane-form. The theoretical analysis and the experimental process that determine this study are structured according to an art/science approach. I hypothesize that artistic forms, here forms-membranes, are also subjects and actors of a network of exchanges that formalize their relationship to the world and the experiential device they deploy. The interiority of the forms-membranes refers to the impression of the gesture in the material but also, among other things, to its own history and to the multiple durations that compose it. Exteriority is inhabited by the experience it deploys in the subjective space of its display, but also subject to a search for balance between the story it tells and the envelope with which it adorns itself. The implementation of the skin and the envelope as an interface between interiority and exteriority, together with the notion of imago, characterized my artistic practice, gradually led to a broader membranous perception of art forms. Through various case studies - including works by Eija Liisa Ahtila, Taryn Simon, Mary Ellen Mark, Scenocosme, Erwin Blumenfeld, Sam Jinks, Francesco Albano and Jacqueline Salmon - and specific artistic achievements, this thesis-creation considers how the concept of membrane-form can determine a mode of perception of the world through the plastic work.
Keywords: Membrane, skin, image-skin, form, empathy, (the) sensitive, contemporary art, trans-historicity/regime of temporalities.
(left to right), Yasmina Ben Ari (RooftopRadio, 2011), Francesco Albano (35kg, 2009),Duane Hanson (Woman eating, 1971), Sam Jinks (Woman and child, 2010).
