Where Bodies Meet Machines: Salomé Chatriot in Conversation with Tjioe Meyer Hecken

Tjioe Meyer Hecken: You began your performance practice quite early. How did it start?

Salomé Chatriot: I began my performative practice in 2019, as a way to extend the relationship with a machine that quickly became a central character in my work, a huge turbo alternator in a former paper factory near Paris. To connect with her, I designed a portable sculpture that worked as a symbolic portal, an empty vessel she could temporarily inhabit. The piece contains a breathing sensor (spirometer). By blowing into it, our shared breaths are transformed into the material of the performance. At first, everything revolved around that specific bond with the machine. Over time, it became clear that the performance could also be read more simply: as a brutal pas de deux where two characters verge on rupture, endlessly stealing and releasing each other’s breath.

In your work, machines often take on the role of characters. Why?

I don’t care about machines as objects. What interests me is their symbolic place and how they are imagined. Throughout history, figures that shift from inanimate to animate – Galatea, Frankenstein’s monster, Pinocchio, Harlequin – have carried debates around identity, creation, and autonomy.

These characters are never only about their own existence. They reflect the questions of their time and the way society thought about the body, its construction, and its limits. Today, machines, robotics, and AI have taken that role. They function both as mirrors and as antagonists, staging the limits of what we consider human and how we perceive its representation. 

How does this translate into your wider practice?

My work revolves a lot around breath. It is a protocol that runs through my paintings, sculptures, installations, and videos. Each piece holds a moment of respiration, suspended, almost frozen in transition. I also produce my own materials — galalith extracted from milk, enamel, egg-based glazes, electronic devices. They carry a built-in ambivalence: bodies that are unstable, at once extensions and constraints, fragile instruments of both power and dependence.

Most of my works exist in this state of latency. They look active but remain stuck in suspension, like organisms interrupted mid-transformation. A clear example is Partita, created during my residency with the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès curated by Emmanuelle Lucianni. The installation consists of four sets of leather performance sculptures, each paired with a costume. They are shown on high tables, ready to be worn, but they will never be activated. They wait like absent characters. This connects to my research on figures like Pinocchio, which Giorgio Agamben reads as a pícaros: a trickster caught between object and subject. That ambiguity echoes Harlequin, especially as Michel Serres describes him in Le Tiers-Instruit: no longer just a comic servant, but a synthetic being whose patched costume becomes his skin.

The leather itself carries skin memories. It’s clearly visible in Partita (grizzly). I used suede on the flesh side, showing the marks of the animal’s spine revealed by chrome-dying techniques. These objects are neither instruments nor costumes. They lose their original function, but in that uselessness, they gain a fetishistic presence. Their shapes extend through braided leather whips wrapped around electrical wires, like umbilical cords.

There is a play of power at work here – objects that could be used, that even suggest domination or submission, but that also resist.

Your performances are physically intense and often push the body to its limits. How do you see them?

Breath is usually private. We only experience breaths from people very close to ourselves and on stage, I wish to expand this intimate space and extract the audience’s own breathing so it resonates with mine. Some people told me they automatically tried to synchronize with my breath rate and end up hyperventilating alongside me while the rhythm arises. 

The audience is part of the performative space. This was particularly true during my last performance at Wehrmuehle Offsite. For the first time, the sound was carried through a polyphonic speaker system allowing the audience to be taken spatially in the sound and its choreography around the courtyard through the 16 speakers. On my end, it was the first time the public was so physically close to me. The intensity of that proximity created sensations I had never experienced before.

The sculpture itself plays a central role. It is shaped like a shell, an object historically used both as an instrument and as a navigation tool, and contains a spirometer that captures my breathing in real time. Its weight anchors me physically, preventing me from fainting during hyperventilation and it brings me back to reality. Its form and texture allow for different grips, and during the moment of contact, it shifts from object to character. 

The performance ends with a collective descent: The sound stops, and I gaze at the audience. That suspended moment brings the piece to a close.

How do you frame the performance in time and space?

The beginning is blurry. I often prefer to already be present when the audience arrives but it’s not always possible. I’ve performed in very different places that hold their own contexts. In theaters and museums, the frame is interior and controlled, while in Switzerland, I have often been invited to perform outdoors — under a waterfall in Basel, in front of the lake at La Becque, or in the snow in Gstaad with the Luma Foundation. Each setting shifts the perception of when the performance actually begins.

The end, on the other hand, is always precise, but it happens later. Not on stage, but when I am finally alone, in a hotel room or back at home. That is when I take out the pins from my bun. The gesture is small and private, but each pin releases more tension. 

People who have done ballet or classical dance know exactly what I mean. And ballet itself is super fetish. In a way, creating a performative space-time is quite close to building a sensual safe space.

What comes next for this performance?

Right now I am in San Francisco, where I will perform again in two days. It feels like the last moment for Fragile Ecosystem as it was first conceived. The piece has shifted, and I think it is time to let it evolve.

The first title came from my installation in situ around the machine’s body in 2018: Fragile Ecosystem. The new version will be titled D.C. al Coda. In musical notation, Da Capo al Coda literally means “from the head to the tail” — to return to the beginning, then jump to the end. This change of title reflects a shift: I have become more focused on the relationship to instruments, and to musical notation itself. At the moment I am influenced by scores for the voice, like Berio’s Sequenza III for a female voice or Bob Cobbing’s Whisper Pieces.

D.C. al Coda will premiere in January 2026 at the Frac Champagne-Ardenne, for the closing of my solo show Zébré, tigré, nué, moiré, chamarré, chagriné, fouetté, lacunaire, ocellé, bariolé, déchiré, partout inattendu, misérable, glorieux, magnifique… This time, I want to move away from a portable object toward a large organ-like sculpture with aerations and breath sensors embedded in its surface.

The duration of D.C. al Coda is flexible — it could still be twenty minutes, but at the Frac, it will extend to four hours. My body will disappear, absorbed by the instrument. Breath activates the environment, and the space itself becomes the performance. It is less about a single dramatic arc and more about building a loop that can be endlessly restarted.

Beyond this solo at the Frac, which opens in December 2025, I have several projects ahead. I will soon take part in an exhibition in Tokyo with Afalula. For 2026, I am preparing new solo shows in Berlin with Office Impart, in Hong Kong with Carl Kostyál during Art Basel – with discussions for a performance in a local institution – and in Paris with New Galerie. I am also working on the script for a new film.