This website is an archive of art-based research made between 2005 and 2021

My practice has always circled the same question: what happens when systems of classification meet living bodies, and who bears the cost.
For sixteen years, working across studios and classrooms in the US and Belgium, I made work from synthetic fibers, pigment, hair — materials that accumulate, combine and recombine, that resist being fixed. The skin color performances invited participants one by one to sample each other's skin tone alongside their own. What emerged was not a painting but a classification system made visible: four cells of pigment per session, each one a record of how seeing is never neutral. Me by me. Me by them. Them by me. Them by them. The grid was already an apparatus before I had the word for it.
The accumulation works asked a question that looks aesthetic but is political: at what point does a gathering become legible as a group, a mass, a population? When does accumulation tip into something that can be counted, categorized, acted upon?
I am now pursuing those questions through doctoral research in History of Education at KU Leuven , with archives instead of fiber, genealogy instead of installation. But the habits of attention are the same: a refusal to take categories as given, a deep interest in what gets produced at the interface between a system and a body, a sensitivity to what is rendered invisible by the act of naming.
What you are looking at here is the archive of that earlier practice, not a closed chapter, but a sediment layer. The work is still asking its questions. I have simply moved into a different room to answer them.
Elena Patino, 2026