“I wasn’t interested in tattoos.
No, it is something else that caught my attention and fascination, as a watcher at first, and then, the main character of my own fate – mutations. The different hybrid status of a living being ; the composition and decomposition of the matter. Traces left by time, marks, prints, ruins. What is moving in the invisible, crawling in subterranean strata and sliding through interstices. Those are transparences, rays, diluted veins, skin, grain. Granular synthesis, fragmenting and spreading like a perfume in a spatial field mapped by our emotions. I don’t ask anybody to understand. I say : feel. Those are ghosts. Those are Shadows, hiding deep in the flesh, the ones we pretended to forget. Masks of distress. Of shame.
I don’t tattoo.
I don’t build up protections, I don’t create armours. I undress the skin. I make vulnerability even more vulnerable, making it melting in the eyes of a world too sad and too weak to give back its blast to the flame. I restore fragility to its letters of nobility. To madness. To chaos, with tenderness. I bring out to the surface what is already here, present and what is silent. I make speak an ancestral language which will resonate in the future. Totems. Sacred marks. Organic and electric impulses, revealers of the Essence, translation of codes and keys.
No, I wasn’t really interested in tattoos.
As a child, my heart was beating for Ashitaka’s curse in Mononoke Hime. This is my first epidermal love memory, and my only real ad vitam. His arm brushed by a dermograph-god, invaded by strange marks, progressing as a threat as a grandiose dream, which even awoke to take possession of his spirit. This is the word, ultimately. A Spirit. How to live with it, to evolve with it ?
Later, I’ve been in grace with the cyber-human connectic of Ghost in the Shell, and with the transformation of Tetsuo’s arm in the arena of Akira. These scenes and visions found a point of deep resonance in my being, like the beginning of an answer (and upcoming reflexions, for some almost impalpable) to who I was, who I was going to be and what I was going to present artistically. No – what I was going to present humanly. As a deep human answer, but also as a divinity – in other words, dispossessed of its own name, of its history, of its desires and torments ; of its impulses, of sex, of gender – of everything what made me me, actually. Or at least, what I thought I was. A form between two phases, taking part of a much bigger mouvement that I could deploy by my own gesture – the gesture of Beauty. An idea in a shell. With a touch of fantasy, and trauma.
I’ve been fed by blows, by the need of tearing off my skin like petals, by the flowers in my mother’s garden, by the wrinkles of her doom and by the blood she spilled, torn apart, crawling by night on the carpet of my bedroom. Just like Kaneda, I was caught in the guts by something almost non-human anymore, on the borders of the unreal, out of the depths of Earth. I’ve been in dementia, spoken with death, and came back with a fantastic creature, ready to take me back down with it, in meanders of the inter-world.
Pretty young, I had the feeling of not being alone anymore in my ecstatic mutant incarnations, watching Matthew Barney’s Cremaster, where the emerging matter was finally taking on the life it deserved to have, where everything was in state of chronic instability, transfusion, transgender, infinite, decadent and majestic, grandiose. A phenomenon of enchantment of being oneself, disenchantment of facing consciousness and finally, transcendance. To disappear with poetry, celebrating the best and the worst of my being. Wrapped in leeches, caressed by forests, burnt by the city. Punished and judged for existing.
The métamose, is the nuance that escapes metamorphosis. It’s the smirk of the flow, vanishing our questions, research, projects. It’s the missing form, the invisible that we decipher to remember that we are alive, that we are. That we always stand up straight and look into the eyes, deeply. As long as the metamorphosis is incomplete, the métamose operates. Infinite. It’s the extinction of the error, against the greatness of the present-experience. It’s the Other, in a mutual offering to finally forget – escape ourselves. It is the weight of our past which lightens, heavy pages of our failures and all our pride that fly away. A curtain of roots, that rises like an illusion, to let appear new lines and stains on the body. It’s the whisper of algae, pink, midnight blue and black larvae telling secrets you don’t need to repeat or even to prove to anyone.
The métamose, is a child with wide open eyes, not dead inside yet. But it is also a declaration of war. A declaration of war against the world, against those who strike, pulverise, rape and freeze the human heart day after day. A declaration of war without any weapon, or the one of Beauty maybe. It’s a Fungi, a disease that spreads in the aseptic. That will make the offended scream loud, and keep the ones who understand in a silence of coton. It is an Insect, that vibrates for those who cannot live enough, and for those who live too hard. A fusion, precise and naive effusions, an effeuillage. It is a prayer to the living, a goddess in rebellion, rising like a powerful wave. These are the sufficient droplets that we will keep, paying homage to the memory of the skin, projected with the grace of Ikebana and the blood flowing with fury. A tissue, a translucent membrane beyond any form of technology.
It is a new reign, drawn up in honour of those who will never give up, of the profound song of the living ; To disappear and reborn Until becoming our own Kings and own Queens.”