¹ The façade of the Palais de la Porte Dorée in Paris, built for the Exposition Coloniale of 1931, is ornamented wiht a monumental relief by sculptor Alfred Janniot. A central allegorical figure, surrounded by smaller human forms and figurines representing the peoples and riches of the French colonial empire. The relief presents itself as an ode — to civilisation, to progress, to France as an ordering power. But it can also be read as a visual language of appropriation: bodies and cultures arranged according to the maker's gaze, presented as self-evident. 

² The images made by Lennart Nillsson on human life before birth are world famous. Published for the first time in 1965 in LIFE Magazine, they shaped the way we envision life before birth. What was less known at that time is that almost all photographs where made with dead embryo’s and foetuses. 




³ The images of Nilsson have been referenced in earlier projects, such as Epitaphium︎︎︎ and Diorama Mechanica︎︎︎.  

Tirésias et la Porte Dorée (2026) was made as a plaster relief of two by three metres with a structure related to that of the monumental relief on the façade of the Palais de la Porte Dorée in Paris¹: a central allegorical figure, surrounded by smaller forms. Those forms are embryos — drawn from the photography of Lennart Nilsson², reversed into negative relief. Hollows, impressions, absence. The beginning of life rendered as that which is not.

The central figure is Tiresias — the mythological seer who was blind yet saw, who had been both man and woman, who had crossed the boundary between life and death. He is composed here from fragments: Saint Ursula with the maidens seeking shelter beneath her cloak, the seductive upper body of an Asian dancer figure, the suggestive shoulder line of a dress by Fong Leng, and the face of the artist himself, bearing the bar used in medical photography to ensure anonymity.

That bar is not modesty. It is an acknowledgement. The maker knows from experience that every representation is subjective — that in showing, he also orders, interprets, appropriates. Yet he chooses to show regardless, because the alternative is worse: if one remains silent, if one leaves these beings to invisibility, they are not thought. Their form dissolves into the absence of any image.

Tiresias sees what photography does — and places himself, blindfolded, in the image as the one least able to do so without consequence.