At the start of 2026, I undertook a residency in Paris at the “Cité internationale des arts”. in Paris. I had chosen Eroticism as the focus of my research. I began to question erotic language and how it functions, and more specifically, what an erotic language in art might be. My initial intention was to create an erotic artwork. But in order to create it, an avalanche of questions came tumbling down upon me: what is eroticism? What is eroticism for me?

During my residency, I began with research and reading, and then set out to explore the city, museums and hôtels particuliers. During my wanderings, I discovered a place that particularly intrigued me: Aux Belles Poules, one of the few early twentieth-century “houses of pleasure” still preserved in Paris and open to visitors. Its interiors have remained intact: ceramics, mosaics and frescoes, bearing witness to an ornamental world inspired by the Art Deco of the 1920s.

When I began creating my sound work, I wanted to incorporate chickens into it, as a reference to Aux Belles Poules, to women, to “poulettes”, and to all the associations and ambiguities that this word can contain.

I returned to my mother’s garden in the French countryside. I went into the chicken coop and read aloud, to my mother’s chickens, excerpts from erotic poetry that I had selected from my readings in Paris. I loved this curious encounter between writers from the past, myself in search of a new erotic language, and the chickens clucking around me. Memories of the extraordinary interiors of Aux Belles Poules mingled with the smells of the chicken coop. Then, suddenly, an airplane flew overhead. The deafening roar of its engines became part of the soundscape.

Still searching for a new erotic language, I then reversed the order of the soundtrack of my recording. Something happened. I discovered a new language, a language I did not know. And I wondered:

Is it not more desirable to hear, whispered into one’s ear, words of desire that one does not understand?