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Pneuma / ctrl + c, 2016–

Blurred black-and-white portrait: a face in profile barely stands out from the dark, held at the threshold of legibility.
Agitated water surface in black and white: pale reflections dissolve into a dark mass, with no identifiable object.
An almost entirely black photograph: the surface yields only a barely perceptible gradient, nothing stands out in it.

Pneuma / ctrl + c brings together three black-and-white Polaroids and a cast taken from a hand. The three images are held at the threshold of legibility: one is only just recognisable as a face, another resolves into no identifiable object. A photograph turns space and time into a fixed surface; the cast preserves the form of a hand while excluding its movement, its perception and its agency.

Digital reconstruction of the 2016 exhibition: in a black room, three black-and-white photographs hang on the wall, a face, agitated water, an almost entirely dark image, and in front of them a plinth carrying a hand cast in resin, standing upright.
Digital reconstruction of the 2016 exhibition

The face and the hand belong to the same body, that of the artist's mother. A second mode of reproduction then appears: the production of one body by another. The work thus places mechanical reproduction alongside biological reproduction, not as equivalents, but as two operations of transfer, only one of which reproduces the organisation that sustains a body.

The 2016 cast was lost. In 2026, a new cast is taken from the same hand, then a cast of that cast, and so on, until the hand and its patterns are lost. Mechanical copying transmits the patterns of the skin, and loses them little by little. The living body does not transmit them: even identical twins do not have the same fingerprints. But it maintains them for a whole lifetime, while the skin that carries them renews itself within a few weeks.

The title pairs pneuma, the breath that, in Greek thought, animates a body and holds it together, with ctrl + c, the command that copies without losing anything. A single question runs through them: to what extent is matter nothing but matter?