ABOUT

At the very beginning of her book On Love, Bell Hooks recounts that her predominant experience of love has been its absence. Her life has been structured around a sense of lack. Her words were an explosion and an echo of my own experience. I wanted to respond to this lack of love. I imagined, in place of this flaw, what could be a collective and monumental refuge to envelop us in tenderness, enchantment, and love. In this work, hair materializes a symbolic body of love that carries our pain. 

I believe that we have discredited, debased, and suffocated love. Instrumentalized to exercise power, or even considered a subordinate concept in philosophy, love is a proposition that seems to lack seriousness. Here, love is conjugated in the plural, situating tenderness as a transformative force in the world. I believe that the times we are living in no longer allow us to do without it. History shows us that the absence of love is a dead end, and our current situation screams this fact. There is an urgent need for tenderness, care, and reconsideration of life, of all the beings that make up our planet. 

A true tribute to my African heritage, I use love and joy as cultural vectors of resistance to the ugliness of the world and its oppressions. How can we continue to feel in a world that numbs us with its violence? How can we make gentleness and tenderness a fundamental right? We must resist cynicism, resist the numbing of the heart, in order to bring forth as much light as possible within ourselves and others. Resisting through dreams and joy is a political act. Here, dreaming is not an escape: it is the active creation of another possible reality, the transmutation of a painful legacy into vibrant light. 

KISS ME WHERE IT HURTS — MONUMENT OF LOVE is an outburst of naivety, color, and love to heal our wounds as wounded human beings.