My practice falls between a spectrum of illustrations, posters, paintings, and sculptures. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact kind of medium I as my go-to since I pick and choose which medium is suitable for the mood I’m trying to invoke. The Military Junta staged a coup in Burma, my homeland on 1st February. Protestors and civilians, or anyone who spoke up were shot at and locked up. I left Burma for security reasons and arrived at the Cité internationale des arts on 10th of June. I have been reflecting the whole experience, pondering, reacting to the steady escalations and little critical events that has been taking place (from guerrilla bombings to the people’s shadow government declaring a defensive war against the Junta on 7th of September) all throughout the artworks I have been creating recently.

Through the piece "Niit", I want to highlight autistic and Down's syndrome children, to plead their case for the duration of a show, hoping that it can be seen by many and help change mentalities. I want to make the audience aware that society is neglecting human beings and that we must stop ignoring them, looking down on them, and instead do everything possible to integrate them into the community, to bring them the love they need, happiness and hope.

"Survival of the Fragile" is a visual poem that is still ongoing as I lurk and roam around Paris with my lo-fi video camera. Peeping into the lives of France born Millenials of migrated Sri Lankan parents and also sparing moments with rebels and artists of the new youth. This is my video diary while I reside in Paris where fever dream-like visuals get entangled...blurring what is real and what is not. A contemporary visual contemplation of fragility and vulnerability as we experience death so closely than ever before.

"Les hommes de la rumeur" (working title) is an adaptation of the shocking Senegalese novel De purs hommes, the first to tackle head-on the explosive issue of homosexuality in sub-Saharan Africa. The backdrop is Senegal, with its many paradoxes... Where to speak of homosexuality always leads to debate. It is a question that touches the very heart of men, their deepest being, their identity, their history, their heritage. Mbougar Sarr's novel is not only about homosexuals, but also about those who accept them, those who reject them, and those who are curious about them. It is a description of Senegalese society without judgement, where everyone's opinion and expression counts. 

In the project 'Orouj' I explore the unique musical structure and distinctive visual forms derived from native Takhmir chants and rituals (Zār), through the blending of traditional instruments and rhythms with modern electronic sounds and effects, while also analysing elements of visual aesthetics and their recreation in an authentic and contemporary form. The main issue raised in this project is the treatment of artistic heritage within the parameters of simulation and reproduction.

Tjaša Črnigoj is a theatre director, who initiated and led a transdisciplinary laboratory THROUGH THE EYES OF THE OTHERS, which took place at the Cité international des arts in August and September, followed by a public presentation on the September 22nd. Artists from different disciplines were creatively exploring a mutual topic. Each of them was periodically presenting their work and the others were responding, verbally as well as creatively. The goal of the laboratory was for artists to see their own work from the perspective of the others and to gain more distance to their own work, to see it more as it is. The topic they were exploring was LOVE. Love as an oppressive social construct, love as a source of power, as well as love as a biological and bodily phenomenon.

“Le zèbre” is a collaborative work of Stoyan Dechev and Olivia Mihaltianu, following the path of previous artist couples such as Christo and Jeanne-Claude or Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely, and many other artists who lived and worked in Paris for a period of time. The project is also looking at the cinema culture and filming techniques from nouvelle vague to recent productions that are using Paris as stage, and finds inspiration in various other historical and cultural events that have taken place in the city in recent times. During the residency at the Cité internationale des arts the two artists have observed and collected, objects, materials, gestures, attitudes, and common practices of Parisians in relation to their public space, walking around the city, flâner, drifting, shopping, picnicking, dancing, homelessness, traffic and parking, filming caravans, street protests and much more. All of this has been repackaged, wrapped in "Le zèbre" using performance, installation, drawing, photography and video.

“Lantaa, Suntaa, Nuntaa” was the theme for a fusion workshop performance on 15 September 2021 at the Auditorium, Cité internationale des arts by Wiyaala (Ghana), Viktoriia Vitrenko (Ukraine) and Felipe Rossi (Brazil). Translated from the Waale language of Northern Ghana, it says “Come together, help one another, love each other” and it was in this spirit the artists collaborated to produce a cameo performance fusing African folk music and abstract vocal techniques with jazz.

In this residency, I have been investigating different states of my body in stillness and in movements especially when it is in spiral motions. I have also been exploring the idea of paths, what paths can be, what they mean and relate them to spirals, waves and elliptical movements. Looking at how the body makes shapes and diffusing these shapes across the space in gestures, steps, walking and running to and fro on the paths. Tracing paths that run from the extreme opposite end of the floor, crossing the centre then back to the starting point while always maintaining the same circuit. Looping them, repeating them over and over till they spill all-over the floor in spiral like geometric patterns. And I encroach the paths onto one another where each path opens up a particular horizon which is modified, if not completely blurred by succeeding paths, unfolding in fragments hesitantly yet persistently and journeying in circular and spiral motion.

In the first treatment of the screenplay for Temps Du Pouvoir, the post-apocalyptic world can be seen as a new golden age for life, reborn, invincible, and regaining a landscape that humanity, with its ruthless and predatory invasion, has turned into a desert. Survivors of the Xavante people move through the arid expanses of the Central-Western region to regain possession of their ancestral lands, the Cerrado and their lives. The encounter with the indigenous world is no journey into the past, it transports us to the future.

“Scented Memory” (working title) continues my research of scented plants (and a series of floral bouquets earlier produced) and Architecture. The project includes the production of perfume made of these plants, a perfume glass bottle inspired by drawings of a house and a video. The floral bouquets of scented herbs and medicinal plants, such as Ruta chalepensis, myrtle and basil, are grown in the back yards of many Arab-Jews (Mizrahi) in Israel, often used for traditional rituals as well as for domestic mundane use. This practice holds a culturally migrated tradition connected to earth. The house plan, is based on the memory of my late father of his childhood home in Yemen - since he left it in 1949, he could never return to visit. The plan is actually made the of a memory of a 10-year-old child put into scale. A later element in the project would be a video art piece based on fabric prints based on the floral bouquets.

Making this project is about extracting a migrated scent and putting it into architecture - I find the “architecture” of the perfume bottles inspiring, something to carry with you, something to hold a memory, to hold on to identity.

During my artistic residency at the Cité internationale des arts I worked on several personal and group projects in collaboration with other artists in residence. I co-wrote and composed a song entitled "Se zantray nou kap Rache", paying tribute to the victims of the natural and human disasters that have occurred in recent years around the world and in particular in Haiti. I also composed three original songs for the "Through the eyes of others" project led by Tjaša Črnigoj, and collaborated with the Congolese slam artist Orakle for the les Traversées du Marais festival.

"Nan Govi: Cathédrale des cochons" is a project that involves the staging of the text Cathédrale des cochons, based on the Haitian vodou ritual "Rele Nan Govi". It is an experimental meeting between the living and the dead. In this ritual, an oungan, a Vodou priest, makes a dead person reappear in spirit after a year and a day, with the help of prayers and songs. My laboratory work consists of interpreting the physical and sound aspect of a spirit or the spirit of a dead person. This is achieved using the myths around death in Haiti as source material. A dead person has a way of speaking, of crying, of walking... 

The residency project is a work in progress for an installation and is the continuation of an investigation and experimentation carried out in Montevideo around Lautréamont's work "Los cantos de Maldoror". My artistic practice includes assemblages, sculptures, post-digital paintings, audiovisuals and installations. I basically work with found objects of heterogeneous origin: technological and industrial garbage, organic waste and digital archives. The pieces probe the limits of the organic and inorganic and operate in a blurred border between the "real" world and the "virtual" world by existing in physical form but also on the internet, being hybrids of organic and technological material, these symbiotic assemblages attempt to deactivate an anthropocentric and dualistic rationalization, as well as our certainties about the things that surround us.

The "plume d'orakle" project was made possible thanks to a period of isolation that allowed me to reflect, to deepen my research and to get to know my own aspirations. I took advantage of this residency to immerse myself in my creations, to explore a range of practices, to meet people to expand my creative field and develop new ideas and new writing projects. The project culminated in a performance in the auditorium of the Cité internationale des arts, on 4 September 2021, as part of the 'les traversées du marais' programme, with the collective LA BUSE and in collaboration with the resident artists of the Cité: the dancer Jules Romain Djihounouck (Senegal) and guitarist Gethcé Pierre (Haiti).