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.

¹ In European painting and sculpture from the Renaissance onward, the putto — the little angel — is a familiar ornamental motif: the round, cheerful child's body that populates clouds, adorns altars, and accompanies tomb monuments. The putto stands for innocence, for the heavenly, for the soul that has departed the earth. Decoration and symbol at once — and precisely for that reason, rendered almost invisible through familiarity.

2 The title Animulae refers to a poem attributed to the Roman emperor Hadrian (76–138 CE), preserved in the Historia Augusta as his dying words;

Animula vagula blandula
Hospes comesque corpori
Quae nunc abibis in loca
Pallidula rigida nudula,
Nec, ut soles, dabis iocos.

Loosely: "Little wandering, coaxing soul, guest and companion of the body, to what places will you now go — pale, stiff, naked — no longer joking as you used to?"

The poem is known for its intimate, almost playful tone toward death — a farewell to the soul as something small, fragile, and faintly mischievous, rather than solemn or triumphant. 

This installation consists of are nine coloured putti¹ covered in papier-mâché, each based on a historical medical photograph of a sick, deformed, or deceased child. The forms have been translated into relief and painted in pronounced decorative colours. These Animulae² (2026) hang on the wall as putti populate a vault.

The use of colour is deliberate. Its cheerfulness stands in tension with the origin of the form — not to conceal, but to make visible a tension that was always already there. In the original tradition, the putto was never merely a cheerful child: it was also a little soul, a body that died too young and thereby earned heaven. The decorative form and the tragic content were intertwined from the outset.

These nine putti carry that history with them — as ornament, as commemoration, and as a reminder of what lies behind the motif.

Le Chœur des Mascarons (2026) consists of nine concrete heads, each derived from a black-and-white portrait of a child with a medical condition. Through a process of 3D modelling, the photographs have been translated into relief and cast in concrete, giving the faces the weight and permanence of stone.

The choice of the mascaron is not merely decorative but structural. In their own time, these children were photographed as medical cases, as deviations from the norm, as objects of scientific observation. The mascaron reverses that position: the face that was once examined now becomes the guardian. The child who was once an object becomes the keeper of the threshold.

Nine faces, nine thresholds. Together they form a choir—not of voices, but of gazes.

¹ A stereoscopic photograph consists of two images with a slight parallax, creating the illusion of depth when viewed with a stereoscopic viewer.




² A loculus is a niche in a catacomb or columbarium—a rectangular recess in stone, just large enough to hold a single body or an urn. The title of this work refers to this architecture of preservation: the intimate burial chamber, an individual compartment within the larger order of death.

This relief brings together three different stereoscopic photographs¹. The first is an image of a child  on a papier-mâché moon—a whimsical studio prop that appeared in photographic studios throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, evoking fantasy and innocence. The second is an anatomical photograph of an opened skull, exposing its interior to scientific observation, reducing the child to a specimen. On the far right appears an astronomical photograph of the moon itself: cold, cratered and uninhabitable.

These disparate images are brought together in Loculus Cyclopis² (2026), constituting a sarcophagus panel, cast as a relief and finished with bronze, oxidation and wax. The composition is structured by the arched outlines of the original stereoscopic cards—the curved edges of the photographic prints once mounted onto cardboard. In stereoscopy, these arches framed the viewer’s field of vision and reinforced the illusion of depth. Here, however, only one half of each stereoscopic pair remains. No longer producing spatial illusion, the arches instead echo the rounded forms of the tomb, the loculus and the architecture of burial itself. The viewing window becomes a burial chamber.

What remains is a some kind of monument —not carved in stone, but assembled from images that were never meant to belong together.

¹ The title Cradle (2026) refers to sudden infant death syndrome, sometimes referred to as the cradle of death: the unexplained dying of a child in its sleep, in the safest place there is.

² Generative fill is a function in image-editing software that completes or replaces missing or selected parts of a photograph based on what the algorithm expects. The machine looks at the context and confabulates: it invents what could be there, plausible and photorealistic, but never actually seen.


³ In Greek mythology, Galatea is the ivory statue that the sculptor Pygmalion made so perfect that he fell in love with it. At his plea, Aphrodite brought the statue to life. Galatea is the form that becomes living — or that always carried life within it, waiting for recognition.

What the images in this series have in common, is that their representational qualities have been comprimised through the use of digital techniques.

For The Cradle¹  (2026) I repeatedly applied the function of generative fill² to a found interior photograph.
Through this process I witnessed how the original image changed over time, the way memories in our brain shift shape each time we retrieve them. With every step, the image moved further from its photographic origin. I call the process degenerative fill: not generative but corrosive, a steady unmooring from the logic of what once was.

The algorithm confabulates just as undisturbed as the sleeping world that does not see what happens when a child dies in its sleep. The process and the subject are the same: something losing its form slowly, unnoticed, and without discernible cause.

The Miscarriage of Galatea³ (2026) presents a modernist exhibition building, the type that in the 1950s radiated progress and feasibility, in which a mass of cloths and fabrics falls downward. The movement is at once outpouring and unfolding. Within the folds, suggestions of bodies are visible: forms that are human without fully becoming so, anatomical without being nameable. 

The spectacle of the world's fair and the silent space of the operating room lie uncomfortably close together here. Both are places where something is put on display. Both require an audience that undergoes without intervening.

The Miscarriage of Galatea was generated by artificial intelligence on the basis of so-called prompts — words translated by the algorithm into images. That fact, too, is part of the work: an image as a translation of a translation, made by a machine that does not know what life is — and that has nonetheless brought forth something that gestures toward it.