I’m a sampler. The one for the cheap foundation at Sephora, filthy because of all the girly hands testing it out, and disfigured. Stained and with bits of hair, some curly. Dolls and princesses, duplicate, plenty, and factory-made.
Bratz, Cicciobello and their sisters have seized their own means of production. Editing flesh.
Unmaking and reconstructing, ripping apart, tearing hard. They’re cutting through but really they’re healing, water finally quenches their thirst. By swapping parts, by grafting the hardest hitting hi-hat at the tip of their skull and a beam of light reflecting off can-aluminum. Patchworking and duplicating, sampling one another and always revering the mothers, they’re both cutting and creating.
Fertile is the scalpel. They were just born, every heartbeat the first. Just like that voice, pitched up through the software and sped. She’s repeating, repeating over and over the same sentence, she goes on and never stops. She’s never stopping, right? I never seemed so youthful, my grandmother just turned 40. A whole life in a rush, just take it easy. It’s nothing but flesh, never anything else. My soul is siliconised and dances to trance, she’s a statue taken away from her sisters, weeping. I tried to come into existence again many times; that’s literally me, this is me, that kitten barely two weeks old that can’t even see or walk yet, that abused monkey that seems like it smiles, with its pink dress. That plasticky doll, who’s loud and says screw them all. With nothing else than her huge breasts and her pride, I’m her as well.
They have set their bodies free from private property, unpossessable, irreproducible, spruced up, the contract ripped and burnt to ashes. Working off the grid I’m injecting and reassimilating, I’m choosing me. And no one will ever be able to pretend anymore that the aesthetic, the political and the living are to be dealt with separately. Everything is creation. The real, the looks, soul or body I blossom from the inside, hijack the fertilizers and the whole source code is other. And as always, my body is the carrier, gathering the morning dew, glimmering, wet. Aware, and seeing through the everything-veins.
In a chrysalis, isolated, insulation material and survival. I’m everything ephemeral, that is to support its own imminent becoming. I’m everything I could be. Constitutionally virtual, I produce ever-potential from body work, chemical, molecular and epidermal work. My own body’s boundaries are not borders, they’re political but porous. I’m oozing, swelling, jabbing, squatting. And forever becoming, always to come.
It is such naïveté to be looking for the truth. I for one would know that it’s nowhere but now. Past and future I’ve edited and I’m devoted to the writing, to choice. I’m intensively watching before I can’t witness it the same anymore. I’m always visually voracious. Bits and pieces of you, never more than reflections. Because if I look through your eyes it’ll all be over already. So I’m summoning you, to keep hold of what is too wimpy to last. Sister to sister, I look for me through you, because our loveship is unownable either. I’ll rob the oldest stones to engrave your face in, sister my love, and I’ll display that picture on every wall. So that we are forever.
To be born again that often is both lonely and superb, but one has to try not to live like a shooting star. To remember that stars burn and explode slowly, going for thousands of years. Chemical is the revolution and the resistance, every cell yearning for a star-becoming. Stars are sublime. We are all celestial bodies, our gone sisters and those alive, we burn in unison.
– Nuria Mokhtar
BIO
Mona Filleul (1993, FR/CH) is an artist based between Lausanne, Brussels, and Paris. Laureate of the Swiss Art Awards in 2023, Filleul is represented by gallery Air de Paris (Paris). She was a resident at WIELS (2023) and has shown in multiple exhibitions including a solo at Liste Art Fair with Gauli Zitter (Brussels, 2024), as well as collectives at Art Basel with Air de Paris (2024), Sonnenstube in Lugano (2024), Kunsthaus Langenthal (2024), Simian Art Center (Copenhagen), Z33 art-center in Hasselt (2023), sis123 in La-Chaux-de-Fonds (2022) and Emergency in Vevey (2020).
