The Atlas Project is an attempt to expand our comprehension of the human body, questioning the ways it is represented and defined, and trying to deconstruct the idea of a body as a one and only limited entity, fixed in space and time.

Our bodies are various, temporary, changing, blurry, complex, interdependent, ungraspable,…and therefore cannot, in my eyes, be reduced to one rigid concept.

Observing how visual representation and language create knowledge, I choose to use those same strategies to propose a “counter-knowledge”, drawing new maps for other perspectives and creating new terminologies for a playful and multiple approach of the body.

As dancer and researcher, I use my physical and somatic approach to explore and investigate new body parts and concepts, questioning and multiplying the ways we understand and perceive the body, rather than giving answers or creating new dogma. The maps, drawings and concepts are in continuous changement, they are part of a practice of naming and making visible, not as a fixation but as a notation system of something in movement.

This website documents the first step of a research that can never be finished. This research starts with my own subjective and personal practice, using my experience as a contemporary dancer, and as a white European person, identified and identifying as “female” and “abled”.

I use my body as a prototype, as my first and direct source of knowledge, an archive of experiences and the mirror of a society.

This body is just one of many other subjective and personal bodies, who might be not represented, not referred to, when thinking of “human body”. Who are these other bodies? Which bodies get space? Which bodies get a voice? What are the experiences of those other bodies? These questions are the next steps of the project.

And it starts with you visiting this website and eventually starting the archive by adding your own vision in “Your body”.

This project has been realised through the financial support of the Stipendienprogramm des Freistaats Bayern "Junge Kunst und neue Wege" 2021, and with the help and inspirations of many different colleagues, artists and experts, like the dancer Quindell Orton (for the work on new Anatomy), the topographer Nele Peschel (for the Isomaps, Heatmaps, and the Water Cycle map), the osteopath Michel Puylaert (for the work on the miracle points), Angela Guerreiro, Anna Konjetzky, Carolin Jüngst, Sergej Maingardt, and many more.