Artworks

the_deepest_time
Online, 2025

“the_deepest_time” is an ethnographic video installation on the time politics of capitalist ecology. It consists of a 1h47’ video, made of four one-take still shots (slowed down to the slowest pace before reaching a segmented visual), and put on a 24/7 loop. First, the 24/7 loop, along with the sound-less, four-way split screen (recalling surveillance camera footage), question how lens-based technologies have historically served tropes of nonhuman commodification, through measurement and surveillance. Second, the duration of the video and its slowed rhythm aim to embody what Rob Nixon defined as the “slow” nature of environmental violence. Far from being immediate, spectacular, and hence representational, effects of environmental degradation are slow-paced, hardly noticeable, incremental. How is sand dust or wave foam, recorded on an uneventful beach where nothing “noticeable” can ever be recorded, a testimony of speciesist and capitalist tropes on the oceans? How can this uneventful slowness, socially constructed as such by these tropes, embrace the rhythm of geological “deep time”, i.e., sediment-forming time? In that sense, “the_deepest_time” is an attempt at an ethnographic aesthetics specific to mineral life. The duplication of the original footage on a 24/7 loop, along with the use of vaseline on the lens that increasingly blur the image as waves crash on the camera, also experiment with forms of “multiplied illegibility” (Jack Halberstam), as alternatives to dominant ways of knowing and representing that historically marginalized queer subjectivities. The illegibility of the footage (unclear image, uneventful video, complete absence of a human-induced narrative) is multiplied x infinity. Lastly, the duration of this work (and its subsequent online diffusion) reflects on the very formats of video ethnographic works: it is fairly impossible to screen this work, its initial and conventional duration of 1h47’ having been subverted into an un-screenable format. By doing so, this work engages with how video ethnographic works can also be legitimized beyond dominant methodological canons that could eventually serve academic career-building (e.g., having an ethnographic film selected for a festival), and outside of conventional circuits of knowledge distribution (a streaming loop on Twitch).

Link to the stream: https://www.twitch.tv/juliepatarinjossec.

Curatorial chaos
Suwon, South Korea, 2025

Imagined as part of the international exhibition “Absolute disorder”, that I curated in June 2025 at the Suwon Cultural Foundation, this performance reflected on curation as a research practice, and on the heuristics of disrupting curated spaces as a way to further question academic dominant discourses. A character from one of the exhibited artworks, embodied by the exhibition’s curator, escapes from the delimited space curated for the artwork. Through a series of increasingly disorganized and violent gestures, the character disrupts the structure of the space, engages with the other artworks, and questions how visitors experience the space.

More information about the exhibition “Absolute disorder” is available here.

[Video of the performance available here.]

I hear the quivering of that flame
Wilmington NC, USA, 2024

The performance and film include sound recordings of a poem, which imparts a conversation with the metal plate used for the welding training. The film uses footage shot during two performances part of the piece, realized a few hours apart. The first performance, realized at the library of the University of North Carolina Wilmington, includes tattooing an artificial skin. The second performance, realized in my hotel room, includes self-tattooing on my left thigh. In both cases, I tattooed the three primary forms used in welding training (a square, a circle, and a triangle), using the tattoo pen and ink as a substitute for the welding torch. This substitution echoes a relation to embodiment and physical pain that have been central in my ethnographic research. 

Nautica 4
Chicago, USA, 2024

Live performance with Nautica 1 film footage, parts of Eumig Nautica dismantled camera, glue, diving mask, wrench, hammer. Full lecture and performance available via DePaul University’s Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/1025253577?share=copy#t=0

Nautica 3
Xalapa, Mexico
2024

Nautica 2 film, Eumig Nautica dismantled camera, diving mask, wrench, hammer.

Film installation of “Nautica 2” and live performance at the Casa del Lago Centro Cultural Universitario (Universidad Veracruzana) in Xalapa, Mexico – June 29th, 2024. The exhibition featured a short experimental film shot with an Eumig Nautica Super 8 camera, and a collection of artifacts including an Eumig Nautica camera in pieces, dismantled with a hammer in a previous performance. This new piece explored how queer illegibility and subversion of the exhibition space (alteration of objects part of the exhibition, addition of a plastic bag on the projection to make the video blurrier, etc.) further dialogue with the main storyline developed in “Nautica” series around visual ethics and marine ecologies.
Through successive performances, each new alteration of the camera as an artefact operates as a repetition, a glitch – a violent interruption of what the lens-based technology “captures” of the underwater environment.

Nautica 1 & 2
Chicago, USA
2024

Filmformance recorded live during a lecture at DePaul University (Chicago, USA), on February 16th, 2024.
Conference paper available on Researchgate.
Super 8 Eumig Nautica camera, Super 8 film (3’), seawater, rebreather maintenance screwdriver, hammer.

Untitled
St.-Petersburg, Russia
2017

Performed lecture (“conférence gesticulée”) The cyborg, the ideologist, and the cosmonaut, around Donna Haraway’s concept of the “cyborg” and the body-machine interface in the Russian cosmonaut training, French Institute of Saint-Petersburg, Russia, January 2017.
Safety straps of various sizes, Soviet intravehicular cosmonaut training suit, paper, pen, table, chair, gender-neutral underwear.