I AM A MERMAID
Performance, staged photography
2013–2018

She chose to give herself as a mermaid. She travels the world and abandons her camera to whomever crosses her path, while she poses alone and naked under a mermaid suit. Faceless. Masked. Sheathed in gold lamé, like a veil worn out by the passage of time, rough as an old rag that serves as a vessel and a reminder for the permanence of memories. That is how the costume came to assume its significance: as a physical representation of the border between the world and the self. lt is that golden part of us that chafes away every day a little bit more. Scars of the life we live. By her desire to hide, she denies access to her identity, placing her entire self into the hands and in the guise of a half-woman half-fish creature. How do we ever meet others? Face-to-face, is Emmanuel Levinas' answer. For the philosopher, we may only experience others face-to-face. But here, there is nothing to hold onto, nothing to connect with the other's image and impression. The performance causes presence and absence to collide. The mermaid transcends her identity as a fantastic sea creature, because what she seeks above all else is to disappear. To dissolve into death, since the artist has already decided that the mermaid would take away her own life and write her own end as it were.
Over time, she has given her mermaid free rcin, complete autonomy. But has she decidcd to kill hcr doppelganger'? The mermaid will be killing herself in a doctor's office, to be absorbed into the long heritage of the Homeric myth. Will she really have existed? Such is the confusion that this five-year experience has fuelled by design. The pictures serve as evidence to us. Sprawled on a shore, standing at a pedestrian crossing, lying on a hotel bed, wherever she went, the mermaid searched for of a place where she belonged - never to find it. With time, she became a paragon of the struggle of being in the world and a symbol of inadequacy. In death, tbe mermaid remains immortalised in the memories of her that the pictures hold. And what endures through them is the feeling that being in the world means smashjng against the roughness of life, letting the gold Jayer peel away and leaving it behind us as proof that we were once there.

- Léa Chauvel-Lévy

I AM A MERMAID

Performance, staged photography. 2013–2018

I Am a Mermaid combines staged photography and performance to explore transformation, hybrid identity, and the tension between the human body and an imagined other form.

The mermaid becomes an archetypal figure suspended between worlds—human and non-human, reality and fantasy, attraction and fear. Rather than representing a mythical creature, the work uses the mermaid as a psychological and symbolic state: a body that refuses a fixed identity and inhabits the unknown.

At its core, the project explores the friction between society and the search for the self. The mermaid embodies the struggle between the identities imposed by the outside world and the desire to preserve an inner, authentic self. The body becomes the site of this conflict, caught between the need to adapt and the desire to remain true to itself.

The disappearance of the gold becomes a metaphor for what is lost in the struggle between the individual and society. With every movement against the ground, something precious is eroded. The performance therefore becomes both a process of transformation and a process of loss—the search for the self paradoxically requiring the body to confront the forces that threaten to diminish it.

Through photography these actions become fragments of an invented mythology. The mermaid is not simply a fantastical creature, but a figure of resistance and vulnerability: a body caught between worlds, attempting to inhabit its own ambiguity while negotiating the pressure to conform.

I Am a Mermaid was developed between 2013 and 2018 and presented at Galerie Charraudeau, Paris, in 2020.

Arsenia Sirente

I am a Mermaid

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