In this performance, "Building the future: the leftovers of my childhood," I sought to reinterpret my academic journey in a way that merged theory with personal experience, specifically through the lens of retinal frustration in Marcel Duchamp’s work. Having written a thesis on this concept, I was left questioning the divide between the intellectual rigor of art criticism and the raw, visceral nature of personal expression. This performance was a response to that tension.

The twenty-minute performance in "The Attic" (Brussels) became a space where I could physically engage, translating the cerebral into something tangible and bodily. Using objects and materials that evoke memories of childhood and my formative experiences, I wanted to explore how the past—these leftover fragments of who we were—can be manipulated, destroyed, and ultimately reconstructed as we move forward. The plaster casts I worked with during the performance, for instance, represented aspects of my identity, remnants of my past that I could hold, break, and reshape. This physical interaction became a way to communicate what words often fail to express—an emotional, almost primal connection with the art-making process.

In many ways, I was responding to Duchamp's critique of retinal art, art that is only pleasing to the eye. My movements—breaking apart the plaster, piecing things back together—were meant to reject purely visual stimulation and instead engage the audience in a more sensory and conceptual experience. By using my body as a tool, by physically interacting with these objects, I wanted to show how art can be something that lives in the space between thought and action, between theory and practice.

The process of undressing during the performance, moving from fully clothed to nearly naked, was challenging for me. It represented the shedding of layers—of identity, of societal expectations, and even of academic constructs. As I stripped away my clothes, I was also stripping away the intellectual frameworks that I had been trained to operate within. This vulnerability, both literal and metaphorical, allowed me to confront my own struggle with the demands of contemporary art—where being conceptually rigorous sometimes feels at odds with being emotionally authentic.

As I knelt on the floor, picking through the remnants of plaster and shattered objects, I was also piecing together my understanding of what it means to be an artist today. This performance became a metaphor for survival, for how we, as artists, navigate the conflicting demands of intellectual validation, marketability, and personal expression. I wanted to show that the process of creation is messy and fractured, much like life itself. By the end of the performance, what remained were fragments—of the plaster, of myself—reflecting the way we continually rebuild and redefine ourselves through art.

In essence, this performance was my way of negotiating my relationship with Duchamp’s legacy, with the weight of art theory, and with my own past. It was an attempt to bridge the gap between the intellectual and the emotional, to find a survival strategy in contemporary art that honors both thought and feeling. By revisiting the "leftovers" of my childhood, I was building a future that acknowledges the past but isn't confined by it. Through this sensitive reinterpretation of my academic journey, I offered the audience—and myself—a glimpse of how art can serve as a medium for self-reflection, where the act of creation becomes an ongoing process of becoming.