SMITH & Marie NDiaye

My name is SMITH and I am an artist and researcher with a dual background in art (at the Arles National School of Photography and Le Fresnoy School of Design) and philosophy (La Sorbonne and UQAM). I am interested in the future of human identity in all its moltings, shifts, resistances, and hybridizations through an ongoing practice of metamorphosis involving transitions of gender and state, plasticities, atomic hybrids, biotechnological mutations, and so forth. Across a variety of media, I study the cosmic porosities of human identity by employing a methodology of research combined with polycephal, collaborative, affective creation. 

During a ceremony in the Amazon rainforest, I declined an offer of abduction from a rhizomorphic alien who promised me an ecstatic cosmic voyage where the mysteries of existence would be revealed to me. At that moment, I felt it more appropriate to pursue this moving quest by devoting my life’s work to it. Since then, I have striven to turn my dreaming and trance work, as well as my encounters with ghosts and non-human individuals, into seismographic tools for probing our world, alliances, origins, and futures with the greatest-possible curiosity and care. 

Marie NDiaye is an author dedicated to the aesthetics, musicality and psychology of her characters. She states: “I look for the music in a sentence; the subtextual harmony emanating from a book of imagination that makes us feel that it could not have been written any other way.” 

She defines herself as a novelist of “ambiguity” and one literary critic, journalist Hugo Pradelle, has described her as a “novelist of unique discomfort.” 

An artist, (PhD) researcher, and graduate of the Arles National School of Photography, the Fresnoy School of Design, La Sorbonne University, and the University of Quebec in Montreal, SMITH experiments with and explores the links between modern humanity and liminal figures (e.g. ghosts, mutants, hybrids, etc.), committing his own body and those of his collaborators–writers, astronauts, shamans, designers, performers, composers, etc.–into indisciplinary project-worlds.

His works (exhibitions, films, performances, seminars) have been showcased at Rencontres d’Arles, Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou, La Gaité Lyrique, and La Filature – Scène nationale and, abroad, in the United States, China, Latin American . . . and in space.

Marie NDiaye is a writer, a novelist, a playwright, and a screenwriter. After studying linguistics at La Sorbonne, she was awarded a scholarship from the French Academy to study at Villa Medici in Rome. She has won a variety of awards, including the Femina Prize in 2001 for Rosie Carpe and the Goncourt Prize in 2009 for Three Strong Women. In 2004, she published All My Friends, a collection of short stories, and three young adult fiction novels, La Diablesse et son enfant, Le Paradis de Prunelle and Le Souhait. For the stage, she wrote the play Papa doit manger, which is now part of the repertoire of the Comédie-Française.

In 2009, she decided to try her hand at script-writing for Claire Denis’ White Material. She has since co-written other scripts with Claire Denis and Alice Diop, among others. Marie NDiaye is an author dedicated to the aesthetics, musicality and psychology of her characters. She states: “I look for the music in a sentence; the subtextual harmony emanating from a book of imagination that makes us feel that it could not have been written any other way.” She defines herself as a novelist of “ambiguity” and one literary critic, journalist Hugo Pradelle, has described her as a “novelist of unique discomfort.”