As a visual artist working between France and Belgium, I explore the architectural characteristics of urban and natural spaces using drawing, sculpture and photography. This exhibition project at the Oratorio dei Crociferi in Venice is an opportunity for me to confront contemporary construction with a city and a place particularly steeped in history.

The Oratory was a place of refuge for women in difficulty in the Middle Ages, which particularly echoes my Reclusoirs project, initiated in 2020. The Reclusoirs are inspired by the small, enclosed buildings in which medieval penitents were confined, which were usually located in city centers and attached to churches. Despite the violence of the confinement, which is hard to imagine being consensual, these places were sometimes a refuge for women fleeing miserable living conditions. Both shelters and prisons on a human scale, the constructions I create are ultra-rudimentary shelters made from basic materials, without doors but with a small window to communicate with the outside world. This project allows me to question habitat, such as the precarious housing proliferating in cities, but also confinement or the question of withdrawal, a position facing the world that is also developing with new technologies.

The ILLUSIO project, specifically designed for the TOGETTHERE with a woman exhibition, takes the form of drawings and dioramas, miniature models evoking “altars”, popular constructions found on every street corner in Italy. The diorama also allows me to question notions of sacredness, decoration and illusion, which are of particular interest to me in the Venetian architectural and artistic context. Finally, ILLUSIO is a mobile, itinerant work that can be carried in a suitcase and deployed in space