Life Expectancy (2005)

In 2005, Éric Harasym, Territorial Library Curator at the École Supérieure d’Art de Tourcoing, invited me to take over a wall in the cafeteria to explore the dialectic between life and death. Inspired by Munch, Dürer, and the danse macabre, I conceived a ten-metre photographic mural alternating vanitas (skulls adorned with deliberately clumsy, absurd wire structures) and colour portraits of artist Patricia Dagbert, dressed in performative garments designed to fall apart. The work embraced a consciously makeshift, imperfect, almost organic aesthetic, evoking the tension between the mineral stillness of death and the elusive momentum of life.