PHOTOGRAPHER OF HUMAN GRACE

THE MULTIPLICITY OF BEING

I perform in front of my camera as an act of embodiment — not to stage an image of myself, but to reveal what presence produces within lived experience.

Presence is often named as something elusive, almost ineffable. Rather than attempting to represent it, my work departs from a sustained practice of its investigation through the body itself. Over years of intensive training, I have explored movement, dance, improvisation, and somatic practices as ways of refining attention, perception, and physical intelligence.

This long-term engagement with the body has led me to understand alignment not as a fixed form, but as a dynamic relation to gravity, space, and perception — a continuous reorganization of inner states and of our relationship to the world and to others. As a Certified Rolfer®, I work with structural and perceptual coherence, where the body is approached as an intelligent system in constant adaptation.

My practice unfolds across choreography, performance, writing, and photography. Writing and movement are inseparable: they arise from the same embodied source, where thought is not separate from sensation, but generated through it.

In front of the camera, I direct, choreograph, and film dancers, performers, actors, and individuals encountered in everyday life. I search for the precise threshold where presence becomes fully active — when the body no longer performs an image of itself, but enters a state of openness, intensity, and abandonment.

What interests me is not representation, but revelation: those fragile moments in which the body escapes self-image and becomes pure relation — to time, to gravity, to others.

Each encounter, including those with strangers in the street, becomes a potential field of attention and shared embodiment, where grace appears not as aesthetic ideal, but as a lived, transient condition of being.

My choreographic practice emerged from a desire to understand movement from within. While studying visual arts, I began collaborating with performance artists, guiding them through improvisational processes that explored authenticity, perception, and embodied presence. These early experiences were nourished by dance training, workshops at the Centre National de la Danse, Micadanses, and later by my studies at Trinity Laban in London.

There, I encountered a rich ecosystem of somatic practices—yoga, Pilates, Feldenkrais, Body-Mind Centering, Contact Improvisation, and Rolfing—which profoundly transformed my understanding of movement. Choreography became not the organization of steps, but the composition of states of being.

My work developed through long-term collaborations with dancers such as Guiomar Campos Acosta, Simon Wehrli, and Anastasia Kostner. Together, we explored movement as a language of perception, where technique serves not virtuosity but the emergence of presence. I became increasingly interested in what happens before expression: the subtle shifts of attention, weight, breath, and sensation that shape the body's relationship to gravity, space, and others.

For me, choreography is an ethics as much as an art form. It is rooted in listening, trust, and respect for the intelligence of the body. I have never been interested in spectacle for its own sake, nor in the glorification of technical mastery. What moves me is the fragile moment when a body ceases to perform an image of itself and becomes fully present.

Years of teaching movement, therapeutic bodywork, and accompanying individuals through profound transformations reinforced this conviction. The body carries memory, resilience, vulnerability, and imagination. To work with movement is therefore to engage with the whole human being.

Today, after decades of practice, creation, teaching, and research, I approach choreography as a form of poetic knowledge. Through movement, I seek to create spaces where perception deepens, where sensation becomes thought, and where the body rediscovers its capacity for freedom, relation, and grace.

My curatorial thinking is rooted in what I call Aesthetic Dialectics: a curatorial practice that composes constellations of encounters between artists, artworks, bodies, places, disciplines and communities. 

Curare — to care.
Aisthesis — the experience and sharing of perception.
Dialegesthai — dialogue through multiple voices.

The dialogue expands through the writings of Georges Didi-Huberman—Atlas, Soulèvements, Nouvelles histoires de fantômes and Émotions—together with Aby Warburg, Giorgio Agamben, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze; through the embodied research of Ida Rolf, Pierre Fédida, Didier Anzieu, Francisco Varela and Peter Levine; and through artists including Michelangelo, Rodin, Camille Claudel, Hokusai, Man Ray, Eadweard Muybridge, Étienne-Jules Marey, James Turrell, Bill Viola, Gordon Matta-Clark, Trisha Brown, Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Steve Reich, Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexander Sokurov and Jean Rouch.

My own contribution to this research emerges through what I call Artistic Transference, a critical and artistic methodology that allows me to observe how a single artistic question unfolds across different practices and forms. While writing my book on Russell Maliphant, my attention gradually shifted from the choreographic qualities of his work towards the conditions that have enabled him to cultivate such a distinctive relationship to the body throughout his life. My research now explores the origins of this choreographic thinking, including the longevity of the dancing body, the ethics of practice, the role of perception and the quality of human relationships that sustain artistic creation.

Through interviews with several of Russell's collaborators—including Daniel Proietto, Alex Thirkle and, soon, Sylvie Guillem—a recurring observation has emerged. Each of them describes working with Russell as far more than a choreographic collaboration. They speak of a deeply human experience that nurtures both body and mind. These conversations resonate with my own intuition: Russell's artistic language is inseparable from an ethics of attention, listening and care. His choreographic signature is not only expressed through movement itself, but through the empathetic relationships that make such movement possible. Susan Leigh Foster's Choreographing Empathy offers an important point of dialogue with this dimension of the research.

Russell Maliphant's creative universe is itself an expanding constellation. Ballet, capoeira, martial arts, meditation, somatic practices and everyday movement all participate in the formation of his choreographic language. They circulate together, generating qualities of attention, gravity, listening and presence that continue to evolve throughout his work. My curatorial approach seeks to reveal these living correspondences, allowing audiences to experience the richness of the creative ecology from which choreography emerges.

In 2024, I attended Chris Dercon's lecture in the Thinking the Present series at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris. During this conversation he presented Jardin-Théâtre Bestiarium, an exhibition that unfolded over several years through artworks, critical writings, performances and public experience. At that moment I had just completed my own curatorial writing around Rooms of Perception, developing exhibitions as embodied dispositifs where audiences gradually enter an experience of the body through space, images, texts and encounters. Discovering Jardin-Théâtre Bestiarium opened a stimulating dialogue with questions that were already present in my own research and reinforced my desire to cultivate exhibitions as places where relationships continue to evolve over time.

During our exchange, I spoke about my desire to recreate places where artists, thinkers and audiences could spend time together, recalling the spirit of communities such as Judson Dance Theater. Chris Dercon reflected on the contemporary tendency to accelerate the visitor's journey through exhibitions, while my own research continues to explore how curatorial dispositifs can cultivate attention, duration and embodied experience.

Around the same period, I experienced Einstein on the Beach by Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg at La Villette. Together, these encounters deepened my reflections on immersive environments and on the conditions that allow audiences to inhabit an artwork over time.

I first encountered Boris Charmatz while I was studying at the École nationale supérieure d'arts de Paris-Cergy (ENSAPC), where he came to work with students around the relationship between choreography and the museum. His work later evolved into the concept of the Musée de la danse, opening new possibilities for bringing dance into the context of contemporary art through exhibitions and curatorial formats.

More recently, Benjamin Millepied has also developed choreographic projects within museums and public spaces following his departure from the Paris Opera. These initiatives have contributed to making dance visible in new contexts.

Yet this movement has a much longer history. Trisha Brown's performances across the rooftops of New York, the encounters between visual art and dance throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Lygia Clark's participatory propositions, Rudolf Laban's spatial thinking, Loïe Fuller's experiments with light and movement, and the pioneers of free dance had already profoundly transformed the relationship between choreography, space and artistic practice.

Today, however, much of this experimentation has become institutionalised. Dance is often relocated into museums, libraries or public spaces, yet the displacement frequently remains geographical. The context changes, while the way dance is perceived, understood and experienced often remains the same. Placing dance inside a library, for example, does not necessarily question its relationship to reading, writing or the circulation of knowledge. The place changes more than the meaning.

This is where my own research begins.

What interests me is not the displacement itself, but the transformation produced by displacement. I am interested in transfers of knowledge, perception and artistic material. I am interested in the conditions through which different artistic languages genuinely transform one another and generate new forms of understanding.

This is the grand jeté I would like to make.

A leap between Georges Didi-Huberman's curatorial archaeology of images and the current tendency to relocate dance into new institutional settings without fundamentally questioning how it might be perceived through other epistemologies.

Rather than presenting choreography in another place, I want to place it at the heart of a phenomenological inquiry.

Russell Maliphant occupies a unique position within this research. He is one of the very few choreographers whose artistic practice has remained inseparable from decades of investigation into somatic practices, perception, gravity, anatomy and the long-term health of the dancing body. Yet this dimension of his work has rarely been made visible with the depth it deserves.

Because I have followed a remarkably similar path—training in many of the same somatic practices that have nourished his work while developing my own artistic and philosophical research—I feel able to become a messenger for this essential body of knowledge. My ambition is to open another way of encountering dance: one that transforms how we perceive, think about and ultimately inhabit our human body.

Through photography, I seek moments where the landscape appears as a state of being rather than a place — where the visible becomes an experience of presence, silence, and openness.

My relationship to landscape and botany emerges from the same research that guides my work with the body. I am drawn to the intelligence of living forms: the spiraling of vines, the unfolding of leaves, the movement of grasses in the wind, and the constant dialogue between growth and gravity.

In my work, the body and the vegetal world are not separate entities but part of the same living continuum. Plants, landscapes, and human figures share common dynamics of transformation, adaptation, and emergence.

I explore the point where the body becomes landscape and the landscape becomes embodied. Through photography, performance, and movement, I seek to reveal an ecology of perception in which desire is understood as a force of connection — linking bodies, nature, and the living world.

Vortex is a choreographic work by Russell Maliphant, inspired by the gestural language of Jackson Pollock. The work embodies a recurring principle that characterises Maliphant's choreographic signature: movement as a continuously transforming material. The trajectories of the body, light, and space form a visual language in which gesture becomes a living substance.

Through this series of films and images, I seek to shift the viewer's attention away from the performance itself and towards the materiality of dance. Close-ups, slow motion, and fragments of movement reveal landscapes of light, textures, and presences that often escape perception during a live performance. Each image becomes, at once, a portrait, an abstraction, and a trace of movement in the act of becoming.

The camera becomes an instrument of artistic research, exploring the plastic qualities of movement, light, and presence. Each film investigates a distinct cinematic approach: an editorial and musical composition of gesture unfolding like a polyphonic score; the continuity of the long take; the fragmentation of movement; the emergence of a gaze; disappearance into light; shadows, textures, and fleeting details that the spectator rarely has the time to perceive within the continuous flow of the performance.

Each film is a moving photograph, inviting the viewer into a particular state of perception. By isolating gestures, durations, textures, and light, a singular quality of presence begins to emerge. It is a moment in motion that cannot be fully experienced through a single image, a sequence of photographs, or even a conventional moving image.

I dwell within movement. When I encounter a moment that deeply resonates with me, I feel the need to return to it, to experience it again and again. I like to remain with a single state of movement over an extended period of time, allowing its complexity and subtle transformations to gradually unfold. As in music, where a motif is introduced, repeated, and transformed, movement reveals itself through duration and repetition. The longer I remain with a gesture, the more its inner structure, rhythms, and expressive qualities come into view.

Through this process, I enter a new language of cinematic writing that continually calls me back to the work, inviting me to explore and film other dimensions of the same event. These cinematic fragments compose another experience of the choreography—one that unfolds through the language of film and continues to expand every time I return.

Alongside these moving images, a photographic body of work and a series of writings extend the same investigation. Together, the films, photographs, and texts form a curatorial reading of Vortex, transforming the choreography into the material of an independent visual artwork. This research, in turn, informs my own explorations of movement, light, and image, and may continue through new films, new perspectives, and future reconfigurations of the work in different exhibition and performance contexts.

The material generated through this project has the potential to evolve into a wider body of work, including photobooks, curated exhibitions, interviews, public talks, and movement laboratories developed in collaboration with artists, dancers, researchers working across movement science, philosophers, and audiences.

Together, these projects seek to explore and give form to the shared vision of movement that Russell Maliphant and I have cultivated through our respective practices of choreography, Rolfing, and integrated movement research grounded in the principle of gravity.

Water reveals the fluid nature of being. Between gravity and buoyancy, the body enters a state of continuous transformation, where movement becomes perception and presence.