Chloé Sassi (she/her/@chloesassi), French trans-disciplinary artist was born in 1996 in Ithaca, United States. She grew up in the French countryside with an early interest in the field of arts. She graduated in 2017 in Fine Art at the Villa Arson, south of France. Mainly interested in photography and videos, Sassi also makes performances as collective and sensorial experiences. She explores the idea of rituals as well as plays with the perception of time and the notion of reenchantment.
Sassi focuses on the perspective of interactive design and embodied art. She searches for an "enhanced corporal perception" by stimulating human senses to bring the audience in a "contact zone". By following this method, she founded Somme Sensible (Sensitive Sum), a collective that creates hybrid events as participative experimentations. Through a co-construction of ambiances, they aim to develop new mental relational ecologies. Sassi also processes video and photography as an archive for sensorial and relational explorations. She immerses her interpretations in symbiosis with their surroundings, working from a state of ultra-presence and eco-somatic practices.
I believe that work cannot be contained in the object but must be made of the substance of living. I have faith in a new experimental collaborative format that allows the audience to experiment with other worlds.
She explores and searches for alternative sociability through collective movement, sound improvisations and somatic exercises. For Sassi, the one true dimension which is very important to her states that construction of scenography to our vocal practices, each step of our process is collaborative and open to the audience. By developing a method of competence sharing, all our different skills can merge and nurture others. Her photography and video practice, as well as her creative process, also begins with the constitution of a relational ecosystem. She searches to build it from an intergenerational and inclusive approach.
She likes to work in-situ, from what is already there, considering the landscape and living world for more than its pictorial availability but for its immersive functionality. "In that view, I sometimes use nudity in a non-sexual way, as a tool to become an atmosphere. I thus often resort to eco-somatic exercises, taking my performers to an altered state of which something unscripted may burst forth. This outburst begins as an encounter with the surroundings, it sometimes becomes a transformation, a change of state or an irreligious ritual" she states. She truly believes in another form of artistic meditation and expression, a properly aesthetic one in the etymological sense of sensorial. She wants art to contribute in a concrete way to develop a new mental ecology: to carry a sensitive revolution, whose first throws are attentiveness to space and attentiveness to others.
In the sound installation she presented at La Villette for the exhibition 100%, Sassi built an intimate space for listening to experiences of "ecosensuality". The audience is laying down, immerged in the stories behind the large format photographies composing the alcove. The sound piece "Le paradis remue en moi" (The Paradise is Moving Inside Me) is a collage of field recording, vocal improvisation and polyphonic poems of the artist. She describes her sensuous relationship to the living world and her need for interstices of presence.
Chloé Sassi currently lives and works in Paris, travelling globally. Her work can be found on her Instagram and her website. Her pictures has been published globally as well as publications like Fisheye Magazine, Boumbang, Neon Magazine.