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HELP YOURSELF
performance (13 min) and installation, 2023, at Gulp an exhibition curated by Clara Chavan and Katia Leonelli at La Rada, Locarno.Help Yourself is a performance that features a hungry character pedalling through a rhythmic training program. Guided by the music and an automated voice, the character cycles while repeating affirmations that mix maxims of self help and motivational slogans, eyes fixed all the while on a slice of cake suspended in front of them. A crescendo, the character is told to reach for their goals and duly attempts to grab the cake. They pull on it and release a flurry of cash that they dive to devour. The performance ends with the character panting on the floor after having gorged themselves on money.
Sound design: Louis Dambrain
Cake engineering: Fig Docher
Outside eyes: Jonas Van, Gemma Ushengewe, Orfeo Aurora Lili, Basile Collet, Fig Docher, Louis DambrainPhotos: Riccardo Giancola
BREAKING NEWS
video (13 min) and installation, shown at Grad Show HEAD–Genève, 2022 and at foodculture days’ biennale, Vevey, 2023Breaking News is a video based on an investigation into greenwashed contemporary land grabbing for sugar and bioethanol production in Cambodia and Brazil. It investigates how the links between agro- and petrochemical industries are sustained by an internalised belief in a nature-society divide and an adherence to the fictive value of money. Situated at the intersection between social and environmental justice, the economic and juridic aspects of commodification and desire-making are seen and unseen from a decolonial perspective through the transmutability of Green.
Collaborators: Gabriel Shields-Hanau, Sawsane Hema, Gemma Ushengewe, Fig Docher, Louis Dambrain, RuYun Xiao, Mikhail Rokhjov
SWEETNESS SWEETENS
Masters thesis, 2022CCC - Visual Arts, HEAD Geneva
Supervised by Gene Ray
My masters thesis about sugar and sweetness weaves a thread between land grabs for contemporary sugar cane production in Cambodia and Brazil (for sugar and bioethanol respectively) that are greenwashed by sustainability certification company Bonsucro.
Zooming out from these specific cases to understand how they are entangled in a profit-driven system led by agro- and petrochemical industries, it exposes mechanisms of capitalist commodification such as the financialisation of food and land.
Interspersed with poetic texts and fictional scenarios reflect on my own position in the macropolitics of food, I conclude with a wariness of green ‘solutions’ that do not question the colonial roots of the climate crisis, which are therefore much more likely to be vaunted and instrumentalised in a turn towards ecofascism.
WE <3 GREEN
performative reading, 2022A 20 minute dramatic reading of work-in-progress screenplay WE <3 GREEN. The script weaves in numerous characters each engaing in some way with Product X, in its financing, production, marketing or consumption. The greenwashing of Product X is rendered visible by green glasses that the characters put on in order to see only what they want to see, or ignore that which they don’t want to know. The script is rooted in an investigation of sugar and the ways in which the making of taste is based on opposition to a certain class and/or race, exploitative production chains and unequal distribution (of wealth, power, food) - simultaneously camouflaged and fuelled by sweetness.
Collaborator: Gabriel Shields-Hanau