À mon seul désir

A feminine figure here unexpectedly appears and claims the space of a window. While dancing lasciviously, she repeats the same action mechanically: she puts on makeup and then kisses the glass that separates her from the street. She gradually covers it with a constellation of lipstick marks, a landscape of kisses that will be the only trace of her presence. Once the performance is over, all that remains is this strange monochrome painting, illuminated by a red neon light, borrowing its aesthetic from prostitution and its words from the famous medieval tapestry The Lady and the Unicorn: À mon seul désir (to my sole desire).

The act of staging a “girl in a window” directly refers to the void left by the disappearance of salons and brothels from city centers. It diverts the fantasies that our collective imagination has crystallized around sex work (short dress, red light and makeup) to turn them into tools for creation and questioning. This gentle and eroticized kiss challenges viewers about their own desires and taboos. It also highlights the glass boundary that separates the gazes of the audience from the subject being watched.

While emphasizing the stereotypical aspect of this act, this distance complicates extremely ambiguous power dynamics where voyeurism is disrupted. Furthermore, by combining sex work and painting in a single performance, this action-installation lies at the crossroads of multiple economies: the art market and the market of sexuality, where the female body, and even more so, the transgender body, is driven to stage its own sensuality, its erotic capital, in order to exist.