"SMITH's work cannot be reduced to its asserted content on gender, identity and the relationship to the cosmos, for even though he is constantly confronted with these fundamental questions, which logically lead him to collaborate with artists from other fields and scientists from all disciplines, he goes beyond them in the aesthetic stakes that he puts into play "1.
Photographer, visual artist, director and researcher, SMITH explores the inner and outer porosities of human identity. He deploys a polycephalous research and creation methodology, joining forces with researchers, scientists, philosophers, designers, engineers, performers and musicians to conceive world-works with unlimited temporality. Disrupting genres, languages and disciplines, SMITH proposes curious works, in the etymological sense of cura: curiosity and care for the world around us, the earthly and the celestial, the human and the non-human, the visible and the invisible, imagination and fiction. By appropriating tools such as thermal cameras, drones, neon lights and metal prints, his fluid work is composed with technological means that incorporate the dimensions of mystery and dream.
Thus, through works such as "Löyly", "Spectrographies", "TRAUM", "Saturnium" or more recently "Désidération", SMITH makes his own the language of "SF" in the Harawayian sense: at the frontier of Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction and Scientific Facts. His own body becomes the site of hybrid works, integrating gender transition, microchip and subcutaneous meteorite implants, atomic mutations or trance practices.
For more than ten years, SMITH has been working, like so many dialects, with cinema, photography, bio-art and dance, in collaboration with institutions such as the Opéra du Rhin (La Filature - Scène Nationale, Mulhouse); the Centre Georges Pompidou; the Centre National de la Danse, Pantin; the Centre Chorégraphique National (CCN-ICI, Montpellier); the Fondation Hermès - New Settings; the Palais de Tokyo or the Rencontres d'Arles, which have co-produced and disseminated his works and creations.
SMITH devotes a significant part of his time to transmission in the form of conferences/performances (Collège de France and Institut Henri-Poincaré in Paris; Ryerson University, Toronto; University of California, Santa Cruz; MUTEK Festival, San Francisco; Planetarium, Centre Pompidou...). He is currently completing a doctorate in research-creation at the University of Quebec in Montreal, in co-supervision with the Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains.