2023-24 Fellow Maxime Cavajani (b. 1988, Martinique, France) is a multimedia artist working across video, photography, sculpture, performance and installation. Their practice investigates the space and time in between queer bodies, living and dead, to interrogate the “seen” and “legible”.

Thinking through mnemonic functions, Cavajani’s work uses the slippages between image and imaging, sculpture and forming, space and phenomena, performance and gesture, sound and noise. Rather than capturing what is in motion, the work reverberates through bits, blurs, traces and reflections. A practice inviting publics to question their own mnemonic system through themes of desire, violence, death, loss and love.

Cavajani’s project grounds (chapter 2) is a video, performance and sculpture installation reflecting on queer deaths. A pilgrimage towards disappearance, it revisits the life and death of artist Forrest Bess (1911-1977). This project explores how body and landscape are devices recording both a struggle with absence and a desire for the unseen.