The bookshelves have collapsed and the flying saucers will never land.
My current studio time involves a lot of “reading” books; for example, their page numbers, call numbers, publishing places, translations, subject headings, years of publication.
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My current practice focuses on affect of archives, especially within the study of UFOs. I am taking an alternative approach towards ufology -— rather than taking a stance as a believer or sceptic, I am investigating the “book-as-evidence,” and subsequently the status of books as objects and souvenirs. I am also investigating how the UFO archive is born from a lack of scientific evidence, and how collections of these unscientific “souvenirs” fill the gap of the negative space. I am interested in the uncategorisable, uncataloguable, unseeable, indecipherable, imponderable book. My practice is born from Lynn E. Catoe’s bibliographic work in 1969 and Mike Kelley’s essay “On the Aesthetics of Ufology” (1997).
Trained in Painting, I only find shelter in Drawing. Titling as content, tautology as desperation; physically cutting, copying and pasting as editorial acts are key elements in my drawings. They are charged by ephemerality. My drawings are urgent objects made from the desperation and despair of a drawer who only has access to their own tools: lines, marks, love for depiction, etc. Stripped away from tangible substances to depict, the loneliness of materials is the only content the drawer can rely on -— the craving to be visible, the thirst to do anything to have a chance for a drawing to exist, the yearning to return to a moment of “in search of . . .” content to make content with. “Contentless” is how I see myself as a queer person of colour walking in countries, living in institutions, speaking in languages, and passing as genders that I don’t belong to. And “contentless” as content is what being queer is for me. This is also why I am invested in the alternatives of ufology, understanding the impossible book, and simultaneously wandering in the impossible library and archive.
I build containers for collections of objects, to play with what Susan Lepselter might call the “resonance” of unseen things and Susan Stewart’s definition of souvenir. When my body manoeuvres through displays and stacks, I imagine this is how the UFO archive desires and demands the patron to “gift shop” from it—using the process of browsing to embody the liminality of “content” and “contentless.” Working in videos, drawings, installations, performative lectures, and happenings, my practice is queer. I am a queer artist in terms of being queer. My art practice is queer not because of its content, but its form. It refuses to *be*, but is in the process of constantly *becoming*.
![olivier - I need to give up painting series: No. 3 Words don’t come easy to me [alternative title: wwwords come to fill the void] [alternative title from alternative title: words have hidden meaning]](https://sites.saic.edu/gradshow2022/wp-content/uploads/sites/140/2022/01/olivier_4.jpg)
