With this project, you conjure up the image of a funfair. What role does this imaginary play in your work?

The circus, the funfair, religious processions and the carnival have been central to my work and my life for years. My passion for the funfair is part of this context, part of my passion for collective rituals that upset the norm of everyday life and open the door to collective passions with heightened tones. In all these events, bodies find themselves forming a collective body shaken by powerful sensory experiences. I draw the material for my work from this collective crossing of lights, fires, sounds, rituals, sweat and smells. What's more, I've been working for a long time on an intuition: the world of entertainment and spectacle can teach us a lot about our society, and in particular about its relationship to war, religion and sexuality.

Your work often blends various media. What forms and narratives have you chosen to explore in Porto?

I find it very difficult to answer this question, because in my practice, different mediums intermingle and I often lose sight of the boundaries between one medium and another. One of my favorite mediums, video, is certainly very present in the exhibition, through the films Fat to Ashes (2021), Qu'un Sang Impur (2019) and in the film that accompanies the installation Luna Kino (2022). These films are in intimacy and complicity with their spatialization through installations that can be read both as immense sculptures and as stage sets, or mini-architectures. With scenographer Rachel Garcia, my long-time "partner in crime", we have constructed a landscape made of textiles, lights, metal structures, foam, second-hand sets, old military tents... the materials and forms are most varied, as the spectacularity of the festival demands!

Next autumn, you'll be exhibiting at the Thailand Biennale Phuket 2025, as well as at NW - Open House for Contemporary Art and Film, in Belgium. Do you already know what you'd like to present?

I know what encounters I want to explore, but I'm still following the threads that are pulled to me from Phuket and Aalst, so I don't yet know where they'll take me.

For now, I've had an intense moment of exploration at the Aalst carnival, which I went through with a group of accomplices who will help me take a multi-eyed look at such a controversial festival.

Your work invites us to question dominant representations. What does the chaos you orchestrate make possible in our way of perceiving the world?

My artistic practice is made up of the encounters that have marked me, encounters with people, places, stories, rituals, images... When I'm working on a piece, I don't think about a specific message or goal; instead, I focus on the threads that pull me through the worlds I'm traversing at that moment. What you define as chaos is for me a polyphony, a collective dance, a rite. In the multi-voiced landscape of the exhibition, I hope that visitors will in turn be able to experience the encounter, to walk through a procession with so many bodies under the Sicilian sun, to rejoice and shout with the protagonists of Qu'un Sang Impur, to fly with the Peaux de dame, to delve with me into the history of post-war Germany...