- Paris, France
- contact@understudy-studio.com
Every creative journey includes a chapter spent in the shadows, a time of learning, absorbing, and growing. Understudy Studies pays tribute to this vital phase of artistic evolution. Through this work, we document what the understudy conceptually represents to those within our creative orbit and those we deeply admire, celebrating its profound impact on the creative process.
Understudy brings to one’s attention to the situations in which the understudy is omnipresent. Its concealable nature allows it to appear and disappear into the deceptions of historical, societal and political perspectives. In this work, we see the understudy rebel in the room
of a goshitel, in the cotton fields in Virginia, in the Catskills region, digitally on Google Street, in South Carolina, in a swimming pool, in Japan or on a bench.
What Daniella Wilson and Arthur Morisset show here is a understudy who secretly aspires to an ideal that is not yet measurable, but already possible.
— Mildred Simantov
A theory? The memories of childhood are faded images. When we remove them from our black box, their original colors reappear like enchanted works of art. Vytautas remembers a time in primary school when his/her best friend jammed his/her pen cap up his/her nostril. From this image was born the desire “to create meaning from day-to-day objects transforming the banal into extraordinary”.
Vytautas Kum̌za, Zoning Out, 2024
Archival ink-jet print, glass,
metal hardware, rulers
50 × 40 cm.
Hidden, concealed, tucked away, the double has a special status, a singular mental disposition: that of being useful for doing something the original does not wish to do herself. Available and always ready, she is called to carry out subordinate tasks. During his youth, the photographer, of Guatemalan origin, experienced this firsthand. At the time, Juan Brenner, a fashion photography assistant, stepped out of his role as a backstage hand to spend a weekend “playing and creating” in the northern suburbs of Richmond, Virginia, alongside a few others, an assistant stylist, assistant makeup artist, assistant hairdresser. By photographing the grandmother of one of them in the cotton fields, dressed in a designer outfit by Bottega Veneta, Juan and his friends performed a political act, an act of social reparation, a societal recalibration acting as a historical feedback loop, creating distance from the central trauma of slavery and from all relations of power, from domination to the alienation of an entire people. “I remember very well Khary and I driving around with his grandmother, the conversation circling around slavery,” he adds, “Ms. Simon pointed out places where members of her family had served as enslaved people, and specific sites where she remembered stories of racism and segregation.” In the middle of that field, in this pastoral setting, does the tree evoke Strange Fruit sung by Billie Holiday? The grandmother’s posture holds both restraint and a powerful claim of her whole being, moving from shadow into light, from anonymity to presence, from invisibility to a moment of grace. The answer to hatred here is to affirm the natural and inalienable rights of every human being. No one is left behind and no one is deprived of recognition. Here, no one feels abandoned anymore; no one is deprived of aid.
Today, that photograph is part of Juan Brenner’s archival work. Through the presence of this woman draped in dignity, the photographer destroys all forms of dereliction and reconstructs a piece of History through a familial heritage, turning it into a work of universal reparation.
Abuela #1, Baltimore Maryland, 2002
Hidden, concealed, tucked away, the double has a special status, a singular mental disposition: that of being useful for doing something the original does not wish to do herself. Available and always ready, she is called to carry out subordinate tasks. During his youth, the photographer, of Guatemalan origin, experienced this firsthand. At the time, Juan Brenner, a fashion photography assistant, stepped out of his role as a backstage hand to spend a weekend “playing and creating” in the northern suburbs of Richmond, Virginia, alongside a few others, an assistant stylist, assistant makeup artist, assistant hairdresser. By photographing the grandmother of one of them in the cotton fields, dressed in a designer outfit by Bottega Veneta, Juan and his friends performed a political act, an act of social reparation, a societal recalibration acting as a historical feedback loop, creating distance from the central trauma of slavery and from all relations of power, from domination to the alienation of an entire people. “I remember very well Khary and I driving around with his grandmother, the conversation circling around slavery,” he adds, “Ms. Simon pointed out places where members of her family had served as enslaved people, and specific sites where she remembered stories of racism and segregation.” In the middle of that field, in this pastoral setting, does the tree evoke Strange Fruit sung by Billie Holiday? The grandmother’s posture holds both restraint and a powerful claim of her whole being, moving from shadow into light, from anonymity to presence, from invisibility to a moment of grace. The answer to hatred here is to affirm the natural and inalienable rights of every human being. No one is left behind and no one is deprived of recognition. Here, no one feels abandoned anymore; no one is deprived of aid.
Today, that photograph is part of Juan Brenner’s archival work. Through the presence of this woman draped in dignity, the photographer destroys all forms of dereliction and reconstructs a piece of History through a familial heritage, turning it into a work of universal reparation.
Abuela #1, Baltimore Maryland, 2002
Who owns whom? The double, or the original model that gives it life? Étienne Buyse filters reality through the opalescent glass of a bus shelter. Certainly feeling protected by this refuge, individuals expose themselves under the photographer’s lens. What pleases Étienne is the softly tinted, blurred varnish of their silhouettes. Shifting the focus intentionally, importance is given to a detail like the hinge of the glass, while men, women, and children dissolve into shapes, textures, and materials. The desired object is not the subject itself, but what the subject reveals through this play of depth: a faceless double, an altered identity, another language.
Who owns whom? The double, or the original model that gives it life? Étienne Buyse filters reality through the opalescent glass of a bus shelter. Certainly feeling protected by this refuge, individuals expose themselves under the photographer’s lens. What pleases Étienne is the softly tinted, blurred varnish of their silhouettes. Shifting the focus intentionally, importance is given to a detail like the hinge of the glass, while men, women, and children dissolve into shapes, textures, and materials. The desired object is not the subject itself, but what the subject reveals through this play of depth: a faceless double, an altered identity, another language.
Can we say that one is well-born only if one knows exactly where they come from, knows where to draw the strength of their roots, and on which side of the border to find them? In Heavens Okwuego’s mind the thought exists of someone who comes from elsewhere—the path of great migrations, the pain of an exodus, tracing the hemorrhage of a people torn from their homeland. Here is where we can find the key to understanding the many overlapping thoughts inside the head of one man, Heavens Okwuego. “Everything seemed to be both a mirror and a magnifying glass in my quest to understanding myself.”
With what he knows and what he feels, Heavens Okwuego creates a world, his own, a combination of himself and his other, somewhere, a double in another life, elsewhere. He brings his dreamed images closer to reality, his fictional characters nearer to his family members. He reunites this small world on a patch of land, his own patch of land, a mental plot of land. “Having grown up outside the culture of my heritage, I have often felt like I was searching for a connection that was both distant and intimate.”
In the photographer’s words: “In this image, you can see my little cousin, sitting reluctantly in the left corner, clearly annoyed as I was capturing the moment. On the other side of the frame stands the maid, her posture and facial expression presenting a sense of fragility. The contrast between their emotions, the resistance of my cousin and the vulnerability of the maid, reveals layers of human connection, power dynamics, and emotional tensions that I often explore in my work.”
Can we say that one is well-born only if one knows exactly where they come from, knows where to draw the strength of their roots, and on which side of the border to find them? In Heavens Okwuego’s mind the thought exists of someone who comes from elsewhere—the path of great migrations, the pain of an exodus, tracing the hemorrhage of a people torn from their homeland. Here is where we can find the key to understanding the many overlapping thoughts inside the head of one man, Heavens Okwuego. “Everything seemed to be both a mirror and a magnifying glass in my quest to understanding myself.”
With what he knows and what he feels, Heavens Okwuego creates a world, his own, a combination of himself and his other, somewhere, a double in another life, elsewhere. He brings his dreamed images closer to reality, his fictional characters nearer to his family members. He reunites this small world on a patch of land, his own patch of land, a mental plot of land. “Having grown up outside the culture of my heritage, I have often felt like I was searching for a connection that was both distant and intimate.”
In the photographer’s words: “In this image, you can see my little cousin, sitting reluctantly in the left corner, clearly annoyed as I was capturing the moment. On the other side of the frame stands the maid, her posture and facial expression presenting a sense of fragility. The contrast between their emotions, the resistance of my cousin and the vulnerability of the maid, reveals layers of human connection, power dynamics, and emotional tensions that I often explore in my work.”
Memory is a retroactive phenomenon that functions in our brain not only like a boomerang of past events tied to places once visited, but also as a material presence: the physical souvenir, bought and sold in tourist shops. Thomas Rousset’s work explores these products that disintegrate the notion of exoticism to create a uniform all-purposely and mass produced souvenir, which no longer corresponds to a specific location. The close connection expected from a traditional and regional souvenir is replaced by the bulk import of a universal and interchangeable product: The low- quality synthetic football jersey bought in Thailand, Vietnam, or Indonesia. He shows that these T-shirts are more like “certain familiar markers that young Europeans might already have in their own neighborhoods” than souvenirs tied to a specific geographic identity. Thomas Rousset works on the collective psyche and the theory of duplication, not only the copying of an object, but also the mental template tied to the idea of tourism. By associating this carefully draped T-shirt with a tarantula, another object of touristic fantasy, the photographer invites us to reflect on the mental images associated with exoticism. Does the repetition of objects exist to fulfill a natural and perhaps entirely human malfunction: the desire to ‘pretend to be’ or ‘dream oneself elsewhere’?”
This is what an image can inspire! That of a statue of Joan of Arc in Versailles. Parker Ito turns it into another myth, the myth of the knight. He paints himself in a slightly transformed self-portrait, manipulates it into a 3D model, and finishes it as a sculpture. The chosen photo is a painting of the 3D model, a model of precision, a certain mix, a subject open to interpretation.
Me in the Studio w/ Red Hat Render (copper tacks), 2020
Diptych, copper tacks, oil on linen
32 × 24 in
Family histories are passed down through the stories we’re told. However, there are secrets kept, hidden, underground versions that might best remain tucked behind the scenes, like faulty understudies whispering the wrong lines. In Blood on the Tooth, Maggie Shannon documents her discovery of a murky lineage that includes a great-uncle who was a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. Guided by a young boy at a fair, she confronts a Southern culture in South Carolina that feels foreign to her, yet is inextricably part of her family history. Behind the angelic gaze of the child the photographer shows an allegory of disorientation between a crooked candlestick and a clay pitcher, all represented in a medieval fair set. There’s a kind of temporal distortion of two histories that converge in one place, a chronological crossroads where a vertical axis represents family lineage, and a horizontal one charts history from the Middle Ages to the present. Between myth and reality, there’s a kind of temporary distortion of two histories that converge in one place. We could say, a chronological crossroads where a vertical axis represents family lineage, and a horizontal one charts history from the Middle Ages to the present. Between myth and reality, there is a confusion between the historical parody and the veracity revealed of an ideological rupture embodied by a great-great-uncle and great-grandfather. Maggie leads us into the tangled web of psychogenealogy, that infamous inheritance of invisible ties that act like transmission belts across generations. To read and walk away might seem the wisest path. Who wants an uncle who is a member of the KKK? Yet the photographer shapes her reflection around the child, who, through his mere presence, exposes the emotional deficit created by a secret left unspoken. “I explore these two brothers and the South as a way of examining the current political climate in the United States.” She moves beyond the partially noxious family legacy, going further to see whether the sun still rises, here, and elsewhere.
Family histories are passed down through the stories we’re told. However, there are secrets kept, hidden, underground versions that might best remain tucked behind the scenes, like faulty understudies whispering the wrong lines. In Blood on the Tooth, Maggie Shannon documents her discovery of a murky lineage that includes a great-uncle who was a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. Guided by a young boy at a fair, she confronts a Southern culture in South Carolina that feels foreign to her, yet is inextricably part of her family history. Behind the angelic gaze of the child the photographer shows an allegory of disorientation between a crooked candlestick and a clay pitcher, all represented in a medieval fair set. There’s a kind of temporal distortion of two histories that converge in one place, a chronological crossroads where a vertical axis represents family lineage, and a horizontal one charts history from the Middle Ages to the present. Between myth and reality, there’s a kind of temporary distortion of two histories that converge in one place. We could say, a chronological crossroads where a vertical axis represents family lineage, and a horizontal one charts history from the Middle Ages to the present. Between myth and reality, there is a confusion between the historical parody and the veracity revealed of an ideological rupture embodied by a great-great-uncle and great-grandfather. Maggie leads us into the tangled web of psychogenealogy, that infamous inheritance of invisible ties that act like transmission belts across generations. To read and walk away might seem the wisest path. Who wants an uncle who is a member of the KKK? Yet the photographer shapes her reflection around the child, who, through his mere presence, exposes the emotional deficit created by a secret left unspoken. “I explore these two brothers and the South as a way of examining the current political climate in the United States.” She moves beyond the partially noxious family legacy, going further to see whether the sun still rises, here, and elsewhere.
This is what we call a perspective shift, both physical as well as a relationship at a respectful distance with the surrealism of René Magritte. Double, duplicate, or replica? From the earthly world, let domestic objects, customs, and dreams drift freely. There will always be someone to catch them on the fly. David Brandon Geeting and Lina Sun Park create an ideal landscape, an ode to nature and the sun ”the ultimate master of life on Earth”. Magic and chaos mingle to compose this dreamlike garden, with a half-pepper floating under a curtain- is it really a curtain? — against a desert landscape, ready to draw some seeds—is it a duel?—is a tomato lying on the ground on the other side? It is the displacement that creates the beauty, the incoherence that distracts us, it’s the ordinary that becomes theatrical.
To recognize oneself through subtraction, through erasure, and to manage to identify oneself with a self-portrait, a fictional double, ideally a disfigured version of oneself, perhaps more fragile, more battered. It’s an act of massive destruction and physical recomposition that Alice Schillaci proposes. “Who is the person in the image? Does it even matter?” What we know about ourselves is often unknown to others; what others know about us is a matter of personal interpretation. So we might as well help ourselves directly, and configure an ideal, controlled alter ego.
Through a reflection on the demystification of a system, Dario Salamone exposes the sabotage of identities organized by the dictates of overconsumption. It resembles a fable gone wrong, starring a “funny” and entirely fictional character who turns out to be nothing more than a cover-up for deeper misery. His critique of capitalist society is ferocious. So, yes! When Ronald McDonald steps out of his multinational fast-food enclosure, we discover that underneath the garnished and heavily painted mask is a real human being. So, yes, behind the clown costume hides the collapse of a greedy society, and a machine that crushes both people and thought.
Makeup: Greta Giannone
Character: Alvise Aspesi
Wandering in their emotions, objects abandon their functions in favor of the art of conversation. In a reinterpretation of the photo-novel, Charles Nègre offers a version of the still life where each object is fully alive and evolves, through elective affinities, with “things” of a similar nature. Physical inertia but fleeting words, let’s not trust the silent forms, let’s ponder of the deception of the neatly placed object, and lean in to hear the feeling of things.
Charlie Engman introduces us, without a doubt, to the disorder of the stars and the deviations of earthly gravity. Disembodied and decapitated, a creature with a mutant face basks under the sun. Behind the closed mouth, perhaps a silent critique. A piece of bitten apple passing as an ear, a peel on its head, the image is as unsettling as the tragic fate of a double. The deserted city in the background reveals the emptiness of the mind just as much as the absent body. Does this photograph teach us something we don’t yet know? Perhaps we must read in these features a resistance to fate, and a possible reversibility of things and beings. Perhaps it is honest to bring to the foreground the expression of melancholy. Nothing is final. It’s conceivable that a double might detach from its model and, on the scale of humanity, inscribe itself in a contemporary mythology.
First, there is the fall of a body, a physical fall into a box. Sim Kyu Dong documents his daily life in a goshitel, relegated like many others to rooms of just 4 to 5 square meters where it is barely possible to sleep. In exposing the precarious conditions of social housing, he bears witness to poverty in Seoul and to the widespread concealment of a population treated as ductile material, a malleable, adaptable, and deformable, first used by the economic system to embody the ideal worker, then discarded like a secondary character condemned to isolation. Sim Kyu Dong denounces a social anomaly, a subtractive policy that programs the erasure of a group of individuals, an extinction written into time. To be a double is to be both present and absent, visible and invisible, passing from a real identity to a fictional one, from reality to the illusion of reality. The chosen framing imposes a downward gaze, evoking submission and domination, just like the status of a double bound to an original model, like exploited labor. Archivist of his own existence, the Korean photographer highlights a situation that no longer defines him. In this compulsive system that crowds people into tiny boxes, there remains, however, a moral- a visual fable: the smaller the perimeter, the more present the subject becomes, the deeper the space seems, the more Sim Kyu Dong rises to the surface of the world, breaking free from the status of a double, shedding an imposed uniform, and living from his art on a human scale.
Girl About To Smoke is a photo-double, a 3D projection of femininity, a smile on the lips, a craving, a bottle of honey, a childlike and sugar-coated joy, a teddy bear’s head with a suckable cap. One is overwhelmed by fantasy, the suggestive pose, arched back, but it’s unclear whether it’s even real. The digital world is made of embellishments layered over an endlessly reinvented image, a factory of the ideal avatar, permeable to whims, set against a backdrop of a multifaceted consciousness in pursuit of eternal self-curation.
Objects paralyze us when they collide with our residual memories. Here, we are curious to see who set up this decor, who worked on a tiled wall to hang Buddleia flowers alongside a pistachio- chocolate Duo pastry. Still life, memory flash, a luscious and floral composition, a combination of dueling scents, the objects tell a narrative, perhaps that of adolescence. In Hubert Marot’s work, the photographed subject reflects back to ourselves. The unique treatment of the print is a technical and experimental process where the object of our attention absorbs us into a physical and mental equation.
Buddleia et duo pistache-choco, 2024
silver gelatin print and oil on linen,
60×48cm,2358 ×1878in
The bottom of a swimming pool is an almost unreal place. We would have to drain the water to understand its spatiality. Photographer Manabu Koga presents an aquatic episode where the American-Japanese actress Kiko Mizuhara floats in a spontaneous choreography, hidden behind a diving mask, both figures wearing outfits selected by stylist Ashling Massoumi and designed by creators Jameelah Maury, Lucila Safdie, and Katya Zelenstova. The photographer immerses us into the codes of celebrity, passing through anonymity and a loss of bearings. “Putting young designers’ clothes underwater, worn by a star,” emphasizes the desire to end the binary of a visible and invisible world, of stars and doubles. The two almost identical bodies combine to highlight the fragility of the social dive, its possible ascent to the surface, and the subjective perception of success.
Photographer: Manabu Koga
Styling: Ashling Massoumi
Models: Kiko Mizuhara, Momoco, Annie Lee
Tailor: Jameelah Maury
Looks: Jameelah Maury, Lucila Safdie,
Ashling Massoumi and Katya Zelenstova
Perhaps it will be necessary to break away from the traditional formal process to approach the work of Studio Ingmar, to engage with musicality through an organic approach, to accept it as a surface and a living matter, in order to merge sound with image. Thérèse Boon Falleur and Alice Orpheus navigate by sight along dissonant paths, contemplating the ideal of music in the foreground. Driven by a reflection on both the exploration of composition and its dissemination, the duo confronts the evolution of music and its media, the role of the score as a physical element, the score as an aesthetic object, the correspondence between the visual of a digital score and the influence it may have on a composition, the relationship between noise and music in the environment, the relative intention of notes to play with “background music,” almost silencing it, a paradox, in order to highlight another form of art, to feed the narrative of a garment or a scene on the big screen. A just restitution in this graphic work offered by Atelier Brenda, a consideration given to music to slow down the fleeting note in its migratory course and finally listen to it in its simplest form.
In the background, the Catskills region. A season, perhaps early autumn. Mild weather. A woman in the middle of a deserted road, red hair, cigarette in hand, bracelets, earrings, pencil skirt, and a delicate silhouette casting a shadow on the asphalt. Not far, between the pine trees and laurels russet by the summer, there is a small wooden house with a barn, a refuge, a secretly guarded address, Casa Susanna. The space expands to make room for a vast territory, a domain for agreements where a thought, a struggle, and a question about gender identity grow. To test the elasticity of their clandestinity, men take the road, shedding their ordinary selves and the official masquerade they display in town. What they leave behind to join the pastoral setting of Casa Susanna is the stereotyped version of a white middle-class man, often married and under the sway of McCarthyism. They hang up their suits in the cloakroom to embody a woman for the duration of a weekend or a stay. Inside the wooden house, these are feminine silhouettes, obstinate and courageous, who share their pain as much as their wardrobes. We could conclude that at Casa Susanna, people play at “being” someone other than themselves. But here, the double is not what we think. The fiction lies elsewhere. The double wears a jacket and tie to please society. At Casa Susanna, it is the original version that takes precedence. By photographing themselves and creating the magazine Transvestia, Casa Susanna embodies both a physical and mental place, a deliberate discontinuity of identity and geography, a conquest, pioneers, and a shift in mentalities within an intimate cartography.
Courtesy of Gregory Bagarozy
“I’d say I’m Jerry’s double, rather than the other way around.” At what moment do we let go of our own hand to find ourselves different, and when do we grasp our identity again? How many days, months, or years can that last? Sophie Becker is a ventriloquist. She notes that it’s rare, and that “this art form is so strange and fascinating to people.” It’s strange because it’s one of the pioneering figures of the “id”, a visual and sonic interaction between a body, a voice, and an inanimate object to which we give movement and personality. Is Jerry the materialization of a thought, an imaginary part, or a Pygmalion? “He’s been in show business a long time, he’s my agent.” Who brings whom to life? Who carries whom? “Directing Jerry and watching him perform allows me to share the stage and learn at the same time.” By creating Jerry, Sophie Becker reinvents herself and doubles herself, like in Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan, where the main character creates a fictitious cousin, an alter ego to lean on. “I find a way to embody two versions of myself, inspired by the one I admire.” Here, Sophie Becker invokes the duality between self and other: watching the other speak is still seeing oneself; making others speak is still listening to oneself. In a relationship between two, there is no going without coming. It’s the graceful motion of a boomerang that always returns to the sender. We might wonder whether love exists, whether friendship means anything, or whether we are always somewhat alone, left to ourselves. “Curiously, the person I understand, and strive to imitate, is actually myself. It raises an important question for me: why haven’t I trusted myself on stage (and as a director) from the beginning?”
“I’d say I’m Jerry’s double, rather than the other way around.” At what moment do we let go of our own hand to find ourselves different, and when do we grasp our identity again? How many days, months, or years can that last? Sophie Becker is a ventriloquist. She notes that it’s rare, and that “this art form is so strange and fascinating to people.” It’s strange because it’s one of the pioneering figures of the “id”, a visual and sonic interaction between a body, a voice, and an inanimate object to which we give movement and personality. Is Jerry the materialization of a thought, an imaginary part, or a Pygmalion? “He’s been in show business a long time, he’s my agent.” Who brings whom to life? Who carries whom? “Directing Jerry and watching him perform allows me to share the stage and learn at the same time.” By creating Jerry, Sophie Becker reinvents herself and doubles herself, like in Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan, where the main character creates a fictitious cousin, an alter ego to lean on. “I find a way to embody two versions of myself, inspired by the one I admire.” Here, Sophie Becker invokes the duality between self and other: watching the other speak is still seeing oneself; making others speak is still listening to oneself. In a relationship between two, there is no going without coming. It’s the graceful motion of a boomerang that always returns to the sender. We might wonder whether love exists, whether friendship means anything, or whether we are always somewhat alone, left to ourselves. “Curiously, the person I understand, and strive to imitate, is actually myself. It raises an important question for me: why haven’t I trusted myself on stage (and as a director) from the beginning?”
Me, I dream of an image where there is nothing to understand. To fall from Charybdis into Scylla just to try and begin an explanation. Let’s remain in this kind of fog that distances us from reality. Let’s stay in the blur, in the enigmatic. So what, then? Two matches. One burned out, the other untouched by flame. A silhouette between two sticks of wood. Arms raised, neck slightly bowed, but nothing serious. Everything seems painless, even if the head no longer seems willing to lift itself in search of a bit of light.
Left, right, forward, backward. Who dreams of seeing themselves like a statue on a marked path? Carried by a convoy of hybrid electric vehicles, the nine-lens camera of Google Street View delivers a certain image of reality, where architecture and infrastructure, roads and pathways, are recreated on our screens without too much betrayal. But when it comes to living, moving matter, there’s a glitch. By sweeping up everything in motion with inertial movement, the camera pulls humanity into a dimension reminiscent of the theory of parallel worlds, where each individual might have a double. Yikes! In this case, the photographer short-circuits Google Street View’s well-oiled machine, pointing out that the simple anonymous walker can become a generic character, frozen in a static landscape, from which there’s no escape. Where’s the exit? The photographic capture feels as much like a manhunt, as a watchful recording, gathering micro- narratives of real identities across the globe, falling into an iconography that flirts with uncertain reality. Under the effects of acceleration, faces and bodies become polymorphous, dislocated, at times even amputated. Captured by Nine Eyes, the silhouette becomes a detachable part. Transformed into a pixelated image, it multiplies without its owner’s consent. This reproduction accessible to all, translates into a collection of individual destinies gathered into a vast catalog of real people, locatable, pinned at a street corner, on a café terrace, or in front of a building’s doorway, pinned like butterfly specimens in a cabinet of curiosities.
From the real to the projected, or perhaps the reverse, from the double to the original model, Hair Papers oscillates on the borderline between “a dreamlike world and a dystopian reality.” We must take into account the body and its epidermal production. Hair spreads out, the mane multiplies into flying sheets, each one a marker of identity. Why the head, why touch the head? Because it is from there that our thoughts, our natural resources, our associated knowledge escape. We could associate the scene to A Sudden Gust of Wind by Jeff Wall. The same scattering of pages and the same chaos in the wind. The difference lies in the intention. While Jeff Wall wanted his characters violently assaulted by sheets of paper, Casper Sejersen, Olivier Noraz, and Elin Svahn depict a composed woman holding her pose, cigarette in hand. Her spirit escapes, doubled and exfiltrated in a “whirlwind of hair sheets, that embodies the complexity, fragility, and unexpected consequences of our actions within a codified system.”
From the real to the projected, or perhaps the reverse, from the double to the original model, Hair Papers oscillates on the borderline between “a dreamlike world and a dystopian reality.” We must take into account the body and its epidermal production. Hair spreads out, the mane multiplies into flying sheets, each one a marker of identity. Why the head, why touch the head? Because it is from there that our thoughts, our natural resources, our associated knowledge escape. We could associate the scene to A Sudden Gust of Wind by Jeff Wall. The same scattering of pages and the same chaos in the wind. The difference lies in the intention. While Jeff Wall wanted his characters violently assaulted by sheets of paper, Casper Sejersen, Olivier Noraz, and Elin Svahn depict a composed woman holding her pose, cigarette in hand. Her spirit escapes, doubled and exfiltrated in a “whirlwind of hair sheets, that embodies the complexity, fragility, and unexpected consequences of our actions within a codified system.”
