Artaud le Mômo.
Antonin Artaud (1896-1948). Photo Henri Martinie / Roger-Viollet, 1920.
Antonin Artaud has influenced my work for decades.
His drawings, his papier works, and the Asylum Notebooks have long served as a touchstone for thinking about the body, its limits, and the violence of representation.
In Artaud le Mômo, he embraces the figure of the scorned child‑fool, the one who refuses social norms, psychiatric authority, and the constraints of language. His marks erupt rather than illustrate. They are raw, visceral rebellions against the systems that sought to contain him.
This stance has shaped the way I understand material presence, trace, and the unstable terrain of selfhood.
Selfhood grows out of this lineage.
The project emerged from Monuments and continues my inquiry into how the body might be represented without relying on surface, likeness, or the conventions of the gaze. At its centre is a jar filled with my own shed body hair, collected over time. The jar becomes an archive of selfhood, a record of what is usually discarded yet remains undeniably part of me. It is a portrait built from remnants rather than appearances, presence articulated through what the body leaves behind.
The work touches briefly on Julia Kristeva’s writing on abjection, particularly the uneasy status of bodily matter that is both intimate and estranged. Detached hair sits at this threshold. It is neither fully self nor fully other. It carries a quiet charge of discomfort and recognition. This tension echoes my broader interest in how the body is framed, especially in Monuments, where I sought to reimagine the representation of the female body beyond idealisation.
Artaud’s practice deepens this inquiry. His papier drawings and the Asylum Notebooks are not images in the conventional sense. They are sites of rupture. Lines, scratches, and inscriptions collide on the page, refusing symbolic containment. They enact the body rather than depict it. They insist on a form of expression that arises from interior pressure, from the body’s own metaphysical violence.
This is the spirit of Artaud le Mômo: a refusal to be disciplined by language, psychiatry, or representation.
Georges Pastier, Portrait of Artaud, 1948. Vintage print, 11.6 x 8.6 cm. Bibliotheque national de France.
Selfhood aligns with this refusal.
The jar of hair does not depict the body. It stages an encounter with its trace. It disrupts the conventions of portraiture by shifting attention from the visible body to its remnants. The process behind the work reflects this commitment. Instead of producing a traditional portrait, I gathered bodily remnants over time, each strand marking a moment of transformation. The jar becomes both container and display, holding the tension between presence and absence.
This approach also speaks to the politics of self‑representation.
Hair carries cultural, social, and historical weight. By foregrounding what is shed rather than what is seen, I resist the pressures of photographic idealisation and open space for a more complex, material understanding of identity. The work becomes a form of self‑archiving that acknowledges the body’s porousness, its ongoing becoming, and its refusal to be fixed.
Artaud’s legacy is not a method but a stance.
His drawings and notebooks remind me that representation is always fraught, always incomplete, always charged with power. In my practice, I take up his challenge to create forms that remain open, unstable, and alive.
Selfhood becomes part of this ongoing effort to unmake the image, to let the body speak through its traces, and to hold space for the raw, the intimate, and the unresolvable.
