An androgynous body, with the proportions of a child but the confident poise of an adult, stares us down — provokes us, even — despite the pile of shit it is trapped in, despite the missing arm, the missing face, the many wounds.
As if it hadn’t noticed them.
Or rather: as if it were trying to hide them behind a screen of arrogance — or écrogance, as Alain Damasio might call it — a staging of emptiness, lit up and laid bare in the semi-darkness of an assumed shame.

A parade of distance, of refusal, of broken links.
As if being detached, unreachable, uprooted — and yet so heavily weighed down — had somehow become a virtue.
So what? this body seems to say.

Maybe it is still posing.
In spite of adversity.
Holding itself upright. Out of necessity. Out of lost bearings. In search of new ones.
A last-ditch performance of composure in a world where communication is keystone — before it all collapses.

Perhaps this work comes before those earlier ones, made in 2003 (see here), where wax casts of mannequin heads slowly melt under the crushing weight of stage lights.
The front of the stage.
And it’s interesting to see the loop between these two pieces, created 22 years apart.

On one hand, it’s reassuring — this dialogue,
this coherence.
But it’s also troubling: to fall back into unresolved social themes after all this time.
Perhaps it is their over-presence today that draws me back to my starting point.

With one key difference:
Where the lights once caused the end of those bodiless heads — incapable of movement except collapse, passive victims of external forces — here, those same lights now support the whole.
Real crutches for a being whose fragile balance reveals a new truth:
this time, the inability to act is self-inflicted.

A mirror, then.
A shift from passive to active has taken place:
the former victim has become the agent of its own discomfort.

A need for recognition.
A need to exist.
An abandoned body. Infantilized.
An impenetrable head.
No more face.
No more listening.
Only weight. Silence. And blind spots.

I nearly titled this piece Self-Portrait of the West.
Frozen in its self-importance.
Curled up in its own postures.
Demanding to be seen, while refusing to be revealed.
A raw exhibition of a humanity lost in performance — in its own image.
As if parading its own dehumanization had become a badge of pride.
And behind it all, perhaps —
a void.
Waiting to be filled.