I start from a question I cannot answer: what does the world look like from inside a body that is not mine? Not as philosophical provocation, but as a working condition — the thing that organizes how I enter a process, what I look for, what I am willing not to find.
My practice moves across image, sound, text, performance, and field research, almost always built around a specific non-human other — jaguars, fireflies, fire, plants at the threshold of extinction — and almost always in long duration, because the things I am interested in do not reveal themselves quickly, and because the collaborations that make the work possible require time to become something other than extraction. I have been making work this way since 2010. The medium changes. The question does not.
I am drawn to what becomes irretrievable when a world disappears: its bonds, its rhythms, its ways of sensing, its ways of holding life together. I am interested in the narratives that stay lodged in place even when the facts shift — in the friction between knowledge, imagination, and power: what becomes visible, what remains out of frame, who is allowed to matter. I try to ask other species — without turning them into mirrors — whether what we think belongs to their world or to our projections.
What I am trying to do is redistribute attention — not as a charitable gesture toward the non-human, but as an act that begins by acknowledging that the current distribution of attention is a political regime, one built through colonial, capitalist, androcentric and anthropocentric logic that Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls the monoculture of knowledge, and that Viveiros de Castro, Vinciane Despret, Natasha Myers, Donna Haraway, and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa have taught me, from different positions, to approach as something that can be undone — slowly, partially, with the permanent risk of failure as a methodological condition.
That undoing is never individual. My practice is constituted through alliances — with scientist and indigenous leader Dzoodzo Baniwa and the Baniwa and korripako of Santa Isabel de rio Aiary communities of the Alto Rio Negro (Brazil); with artist Claudia Fontes, ethologist Anne-Lise Dauphiné-Morer, philosopher Thibault de Meyer;with conservation organisation Panthera. These are not collaborations in the institutional sense. They are commoning practices — in the sense both of making-with, of sympoiesis, and of the political defense of shared forms of life and knowledge against enclosure. The question of who holds epistemic authority, and how it moves, is part of what every project negotiates. What’s lost above all is the possibility of actually meeting.