My collages are born of love stories with archive documents. The overwhelming emotional tension one feels when looking through Freud’s notebooks, Pierre-Joseph Redouté’s botanical illustrations, or the correspondence between Sartre and Beauvoir is just so thrilling.

Archives are also traces of everyday memory; they freeze in time the passage of peoples and cultures. It is incredibly moving. There are so many wonders sleeping on the shelves that I felt like doing something with them.

I mix my findings with handmade paper. I use old cotton and linen clothing, and plants. The fibre is shredded, and then brought back to its original form before being made into paper. Paper, replaced by digital media, is becoming less and less part of our daily lives. I like to think that its use could return to its first loves — a noble material used only for important things. Like art!

Beauty is what I strive to illustrate, serendipity and nature with its infinite colours, and wacky ideas too, The quirky ideas that allow us to weave bonds between us, to create impromptu connections. And I tell myself that by piecing together fragments of reality to show an ideal version of the world, to remind us of its uniqueness and its wonders, it might encourage people to believe in it — in a better world — and to make the effort to preserve it and strive toward that vision.

By mixing elements that are distant from each other—in time, cultures, seasons, and colors—collisions occur, and often, interesting aesthetics emerge. When something that works comes out of it, I always feel a little sense of victory. Which shows that differences are not a barrier to coexistence. Harmony can emerge from palettes one wouldn’t expect.