"Now I am ready to explain how bodies have transformed into other bodies."
Ovide, Les Métamorphoses, 8 ap. J.-C.
the metamorphs
project 2026/27
The art project the metamorphs explores, through sculpture, the transformations of the body as a means of challenging dominant models of masculinity. Conceived as a collection of forms in transition, it questions the moment when a body leaves one state to embrace another. Informed by queer theory and the performativity of gender, the three proposals the proposal, the dance and tirésias offer new, unstable, hybrid and relational bodies.
Between figuration and abstraction, these sculptures consider identity as a process and open up a space where vulnerability, memory and collective resistance recompose the imaginaries of gender, become a force and proudly occupy the space.
In my work, the body is a tool to challenge dominant masculinity. My practices seek to shift the virile imaginary, traditionally associated with strength and domination, towards monumental forms of vulnerability, metamorphosis and reflection.
A collection of moving bodies, conceived as transitional objects, the metamorphs explore the fragile moment when a form leaves one state to embrace another. With the dance, the proposal and tirésiasthe aim is to freeze the processual movement and to propose, in this interval of instability, a beyond of the body: incomplete bodies, beings in becoming.
The queer artistic stance implies "denormalization, the desire to be other, to be elsewhere, and to change"¹. Like theories on the performativity of gender, identity is considered not as a fixed essence, but as a process, repetitions, modifications. It is no longer a defined body, but a living organism, suspended in a silent transition between figuration and abstraction: a surface for the projection of queer experiences, a space of passage where desire, critique, and collective memory are articulated.
Even weary of norms, fractured, traumatized, queer bodies rise again, embrace, persist. They merge and resist. By building themselves through action, they create community and allow the movement to continue.
The work with facets materializes performativity and plurality within the material itself. The body is shaped like an "oblique image"² deviant, unbalanced but proud. Queer identity is presented as a "a de-essentialized and purely positional identity."³
Materials are as much about recovery as construction, reuse as valorization: from their robustness or symbolism, the poetry of changing perspective is extracted.
¹ Renate Lorenz, Art queer, une théorie freak, B42, 2012
² Elsa Zabunyan
³ David Haleprin, Saint Foucaud (1995), Paris, EPEL, 2000,
cité par Isabelle Alfonsi, Pour une esthétique de l’émancipation, B42, 2019
The art project the metamorphs carries within him the desire to experiment with new techniques in order to exist differently.
Like a palimpsest, the metamorphs question, criticize, challenge, fragment and reform the systemic model of bodies.
Forms become plural and break free from codes to evolve, embrace resilience and reveal hidden worlds and bodies.
Possibilities emerge from previous work and research. Who could ever completely forget the traumas and heartbreaks of the past?
From accidents then emerge other plastic versions of bodies.
South Italia, summer 2019
The sun rises over the olive trees of Leverano. The party isn't over yet. I can no longer resist his swaying body. I propose. He says yes. He lifts me into the air like a feather. We cry a lot while our friends dance around us. Then we lived happily. Then, under the weight of our personal histories, under the weight of power, we collapsed. Then we rebuilt.
The personal narrative inspires this project as a subject in its own right. While the request is personal, it acts as an embodied metaphor for a collective body beyond binary and gender.
the dance
Metamorphosis appears as much as a vital necessity as an act of resistance: that of existing in a space, in the fluidity of our queer bodies and in their movements. Seeing bodies but not being sure that they are bodies and not knowing which bodies they are.
Dans the dance , fractures and imbalances are inscribed. In a precarious in-between – between three, between four? – a new body imposes itself, incomplete and yet born from repetition and number; like a process always in the process of being made, unmade and reinvented in order to resist.
Each perspective reveals a different interpretation, affirming that identity is never fixed but fluid and relative to the gaze and judgment we place upon it. Dance as a space for action and resistance, for embodying and bringing these identities into being.
As if drawn by an axis whose verticality wavers, an axis hidden from the world's view, the sexes converge and identities turn their backs on the society that rejects them. The points of support are not yet stable; they are broken, amputated. But together, collectively, the whole stands upright and attempts to extract itself. In any case, it rises. Drawn by a force whose power surpasses it, its separations and reconciliations dominate us. The idea we form traces invisible but shifting boundaries, relative to the gaze and judgment we cast upon them. Dance as a space of action and resistance, to embody and bring these boundaries into being.
the proposal
Perhaps they are two body parts, bound together and held in a single intention. It is a tight embrace made of volumes that are at once massive, unstable, organic, spherical, solid, and light. Two busts that evoke the hybridization of form, flesh, and thought.
Between birth, rallying and twinship emerges a form that refuses norms and definitive assignments: an entity in molt, activated from within.
Because I wanted to enter their body. Between fusion and extraction, in an almost globular way, the form created combines two forces in full morphological recomposition.
In this kiss that unites matter, both Brancusi and Superman inspire the movement. The embrace, the caress, and the strength evoke struggle as much as pleasure, love and mourning. It is about combining a "political message and a poetic aesthetic," about questioning masculinity through the power of tenderness.
It is not out of lightness that they seem to rise up and dance: they are protecting themselves from the outside world. They do not look at us, but their presence infects the space like a legitimate, intimate, and collective demand to be respected.
tirésias
In Sophocles' time, Tiresias was the only mortal to have known "the sexual metamorphosis".
Against the dominant divine power, against the assignments, I propose the trans-serval and the sensible of another reality of bodies.
In a process of revising the notions of verticality and horizontality and their political symbolism, Baselitz's principle of reversal inspires rotation and reinforces the subject's desire for ambiguity and legibility. After being turned, the verticality is extended and becomes lascivious. Around this horizontality, coiling, clinging, interpenetrating, a form repeats and modifies itself. Above, below, limbs, genders, and bodies abstract themselves from formal constraints. The form embraces the ground, the earth, or extricates itself from it.
In the pose of an odalisque but not constrained, the form seems to reflect itself, like Narcissus, like a mirror that constantly reminds us what we are not.
The body is dysphoric but dreamt of. It becomes possible, possessed, personal, beyond norms: prophetic.
