...wandering in a white cube

When I arrived in Berlin, following a trip around the world, I found myself constantly having to move into a new room and leave the previous one. I filled the space with my objects, my personality, lived in it and emptied it again, leaving after my passage only the white cube that I had found when I arrived, and going to find another white cube to repeat the whole process.

 

This movement reminded me of my journey, of the places I only passed through without ever really settling down, the train stations, the tourist attractions, the bus rides, the gas stations. Except that when I returned to Berlin, I wanted to distance myself from places of passage, places built to be left. Ultimately, my identity took shape on this permanent filling and emptying, these places of passage became my territory, the place that I called home. The subject in which I evolved ended up guiding my ideas : creating from those places filled my work with melancholy, with dreams of attachment, and I got driven towards characters who drift in between places, evolve in those non-places.

 

From the Amazon to villages in southern France, and in most places on the planet, people feel an urge to leave the place where they grew up. It is valued today as a way to grow, make new experiences and is often seen as the only way to pursue careers and live a valid life, creating barriers between people who stayed attached to a territory and those who left. Big cities become the home of nomads, people whose identity is in between the place they grew up in and their future home. There is, among my generation, a fear of inhabiting the world, of passing away with time.

 

The white cube is the representation of my existence in these moments and places of transition, these places built to be left. A movement that has no origin and no destination. With my face pressed against the windows of a train, I am fascinated by the clouds and their eternal metamorphosis.