STATEMENT

Abundance, I love. A situation where there is plenty of something can be either frightening or gloriously fulfilling. When I am diving in the ocean, surrounded by the abundance of water, I feel whole and tiny in one. Abundance can also be scary. When your mind is trouble or exhausted and you are part of a crowd in a demonstration, you can feel as if you can’t breathe anymore. Crushing. But when you’re in love, a thousand kisses are not enough.

All my work is a quest to find, question and show the ‘tonic for the nerves of this time’. For that reason, I choose issues of great immediacy that concern all of us and that everyone can relate to. I am fascinated with general burning topics or actualities, especially those concerning life on our planet and the future of human- kind — the most pressing being the environmental crisis and human inequality and injustice, which I can hardly comprehend in all their depth and potentially grave consequences. This prompts me to dig deeper. My work raises questions but it does not answer them. My aim is to move people on a mental, emotional and energetic level. My working method is itchy and revealing, person- al and universal, liberating and oppressive, light-hearted and dystopian.

My creative process usually starts with observations, followed by research and collecting material, which can vary from text to photographic images, from sound to videos, from found objects to natural and/or plastic waste. When I am busy with my collections, I feel like being in a large school of fish, moving together in the currents of the sea. Feeling small and strong at the same time. Sitting on top of my thousands of colorful books, slowly floating in my ocean of photographic images, or calling and texting with all the amazing assistants that were, as myself, madly searching dance videos from all around the world, I feel ‘connected’, I feel like I am more than just one being.

I gather all this information in my laboratory, which is a hybrid space both in my inner world and the ever changing physical studio, which can be anything from my studio in Brussels or the open space below my house in Botopasi, to the Amazon forest, the Suriname River, a sea or an ocean. I can find studio space in every place. I congregate all the material, boil it together, hammer it through, swallow it all, binge on it, love and hate it. I chew it until it’s transformed and, eventually, spit it out in a surprising shape that found its meaning along the way.

Being in flux is both uplifting and necessary for my life and work. My preferred state is malleability. My mind can handle multiple complex things at the same time and my body loves to be in contrasting environments. Order and chaos. Dark and light. Digital and analog. It may seem that contradictions are incompatible, but embracing opposites brings flexibility and energy. Hav- ing a paradoxical mentality shows the opposing sides that often form the base of complex issues. Unraveling the un-understandable can be done more effectively, not with ‘either-or’ thinking but rather with an ‘and-and’ perspective. Movement cracks my mind open and pre- vents me from getting rusty. It’s better not to give in to the fear of the unknown and cling to what one has, but to allow oneself to move towards a more vibrant and enlightened way of life. The ceaseless shapeshifting is what feeds me; by not being fully embedded in just one thing, I create openness in everything I do. Change is the only constant in life.

Having homes in both hemispheres and living in between cultures and biotopes. Being queer, often having more than on lover while traveling worlds. I am always on the move: physically, intellectually, emotionally, artistically. My identity is formed by being at home in all those different places, as well as of the moments of mov-ing freely between them. Therefor my practice thrives on a universal flow in this era of hybridity, collectivity and non-stop connectedness. My chameleon attitude functions as a resignation from a ‘signature style’ as a good-bye to the delusive purity of modernism, which feeds the commercial notion of a ‘brand’. In this sense, my fluidity neglects the notion of a clear ‘visual gram- mar’ and impairs the semantic autonomy of my work.It keeps my art attached to me — the heterogeneous positions of my work are justified through the various facets of my personality. My art is more an extension of myself, rather than a stand-alone and self-explanatory body of work.