TAGAYI d

Lives and works in Sucy-en-Brie, France

Artist statement

My practice begins with a question: what happens when an ordinary object is pushed beyond the function for which it was made? Working across installation, sculpture, assemblage, painting, sound and video, I use ordinary, discarded and displaced materials as carriers of social histories. I call this research The Aesthetics of Friction. For me, friction is the space where incompatible realities meet: consumption and deprivation, movement and borders, protection and surveillance, visibility and disappearance, the ordinary object and the human condition. I do not seek to illustrate these realities. I displace their material signs. A garment becomes architecture. A commercial container becomes a site of inaccessible desire. Life jackets and beverage crates become a raft. An absent animal survives through the traces of its domestication and possession. My work is also shaped by a personal history of migration. The name TAGAYI is a tribute to my cousin, who disappeared while crossing toward Europe. This absence became the starting point of a broader inquiry into memory, displacement, belonging, transmission and the human condition. I am interested in the moment when an object ceases to be what it was intended to be and begins to reveal the system that gave it meaning.

Artwork