Le Palier / M — Flaneuse du Mal

‘Le Palier’Digital video with sound, 4:21 mins, 2024)

‘Le Palier’ is a video situated in the building of Freud Museum London and conceived as a response to the story of the building’s last residents, Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna. Freud died a year after moving into the house, while Anna lived there for another 40 years, overseeing its transformation into a museum.

The work is particularly interested in that process of transformation, drawing parallels between the space and the objects it houses as a landscape sculpted by lived experiences of its last residents and the real and imagined struggles of Anna as a woman living in her father’s shadow. Speculating on Anna’s elusive relationship with her father, the work explores the themes of patriarchy, agency, and ultimately the conditions for emancipation by inhabiting the space and imagining its interactions with the visitor.

The central theme of metamorphosis as a modality of emancipatory politics is investigated through the method of quotation and appropriation, as well as through the encounter and inevitable entanglement of the lived experiences of the host and the guest.