No One’s Story
2023–
Nurse Émilie / Jieyi / Detective Yixin / La maison dans les airs
Click on the different names to access the different stories.
No One’s Story is a series that I began developing when I arrived at Villa Arson and that continues to evolve today. Entering the school also meant entering a new linguistic, institutional, and social environment. From this position as an outsider, I began responding to this unfamiliar situation through role-play, successively creating several interconnected identities: Nurse Émilie, Jieyi, and Detective Yixin.
As my life at Villa Arson unfolded, these characters began leaving traces in one another’s stories: an event experienced by one character becomes a clue in another’s investigation; real encounters, misunderstandings, objects, and places continuously enter the fiction. At the same time, people around me may also become characters, interlocutors, or sources of clues. Their responses, in turn, further alter the development of the characters and events.
This continuously evolving narrative eventually led me back to the history of Villa Arson itself. In 1991, Christian Bernard and Éric Troncy curated the exhibition No Man’s Time there. More than thirty years later, I borrowed the structure of its title to rename this series, which began with my arrival at Villa Arson: No One’s Story.
My personal experiences, the social relationships within the school, fictional characters, and the institution’s own history thus enter the same narrative system, in which the story continuously circulates between reality and fiction, personal and institutional memory, author and participants.
2023–
Nurse Émilie / Jieyi / Detective Yixin / La maison dans les airs
Click on the different names to access the different stories.
No One’s Story is a series that I began developing when I arrived at Villa Arson and that continues to evolve today. Entering the school also meant entering a new linguistic, institutional, and social environment. From this position as an outsider, I began responding to this unfamiliar situation through role-play, successively creating several interconnected identities: Nurse Émilie, Jieyi, and Detective Yixin.
As my life at Villa Arson unfolded, these characters began leaving traces in one another’s stories: an event experienced by one character becomes a clue in another’s investigation; real encounters, misunderstandings, objects, and places continuously enter the fiction. At the same time, people around me may also become characters, interlocutors, or sources of clues. Their responses, in turn, further alter the development of the characters and events.
This continuously evolving narrative eventually led me back to the history of Villa Arson itself. In 1991, Christian Bernard and Éric Troncy curated the exhibition No Man’s Time there. More than thirty years later, I borrowed the structure of its title to rename this series, which began with my arrival at Villa Arson: No One’s Story.
My personal experiences, the social relationships within the school, fictional characters, and the institution’s own history thus enter the same narrative system, in which the story continuously circulates between reality and fiction, personal and institutional memory, author and participants.