Stories are like water. Think of a flood: it flows, seeping everywhere, into houses. I had a lot of embryonic stories in me. And to make them hatch, I could just as well turn them into performances as books, animated films, exhibitions… I had the feeling of being transported by this freedom, of being caught in a flood that gave birth to me.

I start with stories, seemingly innocuous events from my own family history, and then bring them into contact with world history in the broadest sense. To begin with, Les Vies en soi, as the title says, are lives per se, which revolve almost like a ball. We are formed by the current of stories that make up our life and then we let ourselves be carried a little bit by chance without really knowing where we’re heading. What is there to be discovered is as much an exterior landscape as an interior one. We carry the history of the world. That’s why (among other reasons) they are Les Vies en soi – life itself, lives themselves. I see them as a form of dialogue between our intimate stories and the history of the world. How should we behave in order to feel alive in each situation we get into? This would require us to be at a point of balance between everything that affects us personally, individually; even completely unconscious things, which would seem to be completely beyond us. I try to put everything in the same current, in the same flow.

Les Vies en soi owes everything to my insomnia. At night, we’re in somewhat unusual states. Things that seem small during the day seem immense to us at night. Our bodies aren’t the same, the length of our arms... All projects are born at night.

I don't feel like I’m an author, but rather that I’m inspired. It’s a bit of a blur at first. I imagine the embodiment of these stories: the voice, the music I could use; the objects I will hold; how a book will unfold around this story. Then, during the day, I work at creating them. I get into it on level of a profession. I love professions. I feel that each one has its own way of thinking, its own way of understanding the world. And so, once I have the energy of these stories, I try to think of them from the perspective of my two professions. From the perspective of the black of the stage and the white of the exhibition space. Each story adapts, just like us. We’re not the same when we talk to an old uncle as when to a young child. I don't speak the same way when I'm on stage as when I’m in an exhibition space.

The stories are at a place somewhere between the imaginary and reality, but I try to hold the thread, to stay in the realm of the plausible. These are projections in which I place myself in situations that could be plausible, so that in the end I don’t know myself what’s real and what’s imaginary. But that isn’t the goal of the project. The goal is to try to reach a state of mind where we can face things that are beyond us. Facing death, facing love, facing the unknown ...

To tell a story of what life after death might be like, I need my own experience just as much as all the cultural imaginations I’m able to discover.

I’m really trying to get to where everything is like the condition that the English romantic poet Coleridge called ‘suspension of disbelief’. That’s the state I want to place the audience in. Once they enter the black box of the theatre with me, they’re in a place where anything is possible.

It’s just like opening a novel. If I take Stendhal, when he places his character Fabrice del Dongo in the battle of Waterloo, we do not think to ourselves that Napoleon is real and that the hero is fictional. No. We’re in a particular state that the novel allows, a state that I try to recreate on stage and in exhibitions: a state which combines reality and fiction to approach the truth of life.

— Interview by Benoît Henken on January 27, 2020