I dedicate careful attention to researching and realizing my projects. However, I have been unable to restrict myself to one field, instead, working across several disciplines over the course of my career. I studied English and French literature and Women’s Studies as part of a liberal arts degree program at Oberlin College. As a graduate student at the University of Oxford, I continued my research in Women’s Studies and Modern Languages, writing on feminist post-structuralism and postcolonial theory, including on Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères (1969) and utopia; women, nature and space/place; and orality in Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia (1985). My D.Phil. thesis is on the discursive life-writing of the Algerian moudjahidate – women who wrote (or bore witness) in the first-person about their militant experiences in the Revolution (1954-1962). Reading the life-writing of the moudjahidate alongside theories of postmodernist historiography, dialectics of trauma, intertextuality and ‘minor’ literature, my thesis investigates the continuum between writing, resistance, and political action which I argue their work represents. Between college and university, I studied visual art at several institutions in New York City, including The Art Students League of New York, the School of Visual Arts (SVA), and the New York Academy of Art where I enrolled in the MFA program in 2000. After finishing my D.Phil. thesis at Oxford I undertook research fellowships in the digital humanities, information and book studies at UCLA and Umeå University, respectively. I currently teach at the IUT de St-Cloud – Pôle Métiers du Livre, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense in France. I see my research in the humanities and the visual arts as intertwined.
To this end, my practice represents an attempt to demystify constructions of authenticity and make space for ambiguities. Ambiguities – in the form of hybridity, métissage, nomadism, hopeful monsters and border zones – provide us with the possibility to negotiate a space among the world’s dominant paradigms in which secretive and multiple manifestations of diversity are not anticipated, accommodated or neutralized (Lionnet 1989; Glissant 1969, 1981, 1990; also see Hayles 2008 and Braidotti 1994). I blur the boundaries that separate practice, theory and criticism – and then creatively engage with the uncertainties that ensue. There is something purposefully self-reflective about this process. Although fictionalized or obscured to some extent, I often use personal experience as a starting point for my projects.
Books, photographs, films/videos, maps, objects and archival materials that reference (and/or de/construct) certain discourses are my primary material. There is an element of appropriation to this – using these discourses – these stories – to create something new – to tell a different story. As a result of the conceptual and material linkages between projects, there tends to be a time-based quality to my work as themes are repeated or reexamined in different contexts, using different formats.
To this end, my practice represents an attempt to demystify constructions of authenticity and make space for ambiguities. Ambiguities – in the form of hybridity, métissage, nomadism, hopeful monsters and border zones – provide us with the possibility to negotiate a space among the world’s dominant paradigms in which secretive and multiple manifestations of diversity are not anticipated, accommodated or neutralized (Lionnet 1989; Glissant 1969, 1981, 1990; also see Hayles 2008 and Braidotti 1994). I blur the boundaries that separate practice, theory and criticism – and then creatively engage with the uncertainties that ensue. There is something purposefully self-reflective about this process. Although fictionalized or obscured to some extent, I often use personal experience as a starting point for my projects.
Books, photographs, films/videos, maps, objects and archival materials that reference (and/or de/construct) certain discourses are my primary material. There is an element of appropriation to this – using these discourses – these stories – to create something new – to tell a different story. As a result of the conceptual and material linkages between projects, there tends to be a time-based quality to my work as themes are repeated or reexamined in different contexts, using different formats.
