¹ The façade of the Palais de la Porte Dorée in Paris, built for the Exposition Coloniale of 1931, is ornamented with 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.

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 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.

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 relief is mounted on a panel covered with thin slices of brick. Familiar from domestic interiors and reception rooms of the 1970s, this cladding evokes the warmth and solidity once associated with exposed masonry. For those who grew up with such interiors, it may carry an intimate memory of childhood. Yet its apparent solidity is an illusion: the bricks form a surface, bearing no structural weight.

This relief in unfired clay takes a historical medical photograph as the starting point.  The photograph records a child whose eyes are obscured by a bar to conceal their identity. Intended to document a physical abnormality, it also preserves something incidental to its clinical purpose: a quiet, almost serene arrangement of the hands, suggesting prayer.

Translated into clay, this gesture acquires a different presence. The figure remains deliberately unfinished and unfired, its surface susceptible to cracking, deterioration and change. This fragility extends to the image itself, suspended between a medical record and a devotional representation.