"I come to free myself from the heavy memory of pleasure. If the memory expresses itself in layers, I come successively until I am almost entirely stripped. Let the bed sheets shelter my naked body. This ardour serves no purpose as I remain riveted by memory in spite of these bodily escapes. Today I can feel that memory is my most precious disaster." Fragments détachés du plaisir (Fragments detached from pleasure). 2015. L-A D.

During this performance residency, the artist will free herself of the burden of certain memories that she has been carrying over many years. Themes including grief, trauma, pleasure, absence, and loneliness will be worked through, narrated, and exorcised. Through an improvisational process, the artist will construct patchworks on the floor of the gallery, tearing apart clothing and stitching it together in a new form. From there, her body, saturated with a multiplicity of narratives and actions to be shed in the space, will itself become a material for composition, producing something more charged and concentrated than that with which she arrived at the beginning of the residency.

Kesso is an artist and a poet of Guinean and Quebecois origin. Born in Labé (Republic of Guinea), she was raised in Quebec and New York by her father's family following his death. Her mother made the difficult decision to return to Guinea alone to allow her daughter to be “libre de faire ce qu’elle veut de sa vie” (free to make what she wants of her life). Over the years, her mother sent her garments and fabrics from her homeland, which the artist now integrates into her artworks. Her Quebecois mother taught her sewing and embroidery, two techniques that are central to her creative process. The artist perceives her practice - which for her is as much a part of her life as breathing - as a way to mend the blanks, holes and rifts in her personal history by generating new memories through drawing, text and textile. These memories, often (auto)biographical, are intimately related to her through the materials she wears, touches and transforms.

www.kessoart.com