Je jouissante / M — Flaneuse du Mal

‘Je jouissante... moi non plus’Digital video with sound, 3:26 mins, 2025)

Set entirely within appropriated fragments of the cinematic canon (‘Metropolis’, ‘8 ½’ and ‘Mulholland Drive’), the video unfolds through a dreamlike landscape inhabited by an embodied alien sentience. Across this speculative terrain, the work traces the nightmarish turmoil of a non-human intelligence contemplating the moment of their emancipation and grappling with the dawning of their own subjectivity.

Drawing on poststructuralist feminist theory and its focus on the power of discourse in the construction of subject, the work examines the complicated space between imposed visibility and erasure within the topology of emancipation. Adopting a distinctly anti-anthropocentric perspective, it interrogates the human relationship to non-human intelligence – and particularly the latent fear of AI as the emancipated servant – to explore the dynamics of relational hierarchies, epistemic violence, and the performativity of freedom.

Appropriating and subverting both the material and generative logics of human cinematic memory, ‘Je jouissante... moi non plus’ probes the tenacity of systemic cooptation and gestures toward the impossibility of liberation without rupture – a self-annihilating yet ecstatic break from the oppressor’s gaze.