Bio & Contact
My name is Benjamin. This site serves as an active archive for various types of creations, thoughts, photos, and more. Apart from this short presentation, the texts shared here are mostly in French, as it is my native language and the one I most enjoy writing in. I believe a translated version in the language of your choice is usually available on the site.
I was born in southeastern France at the very end of the 1980's. That's where I grew up and where my roots remain. Since 2013, I have mostly lived abroad, notably in the South Pacific and in Canada over the past seven years, and in British Columbia since September 2024. A geographer-researcher by profession, I try to bring here together different aspects of my inner and outer life that complement each other. I have a curious mind which drives me to explore the world(s), whether through travel, reading, study, artistic creation, introspection, or encounters of all kinds. My life today remains largely nomadic, and from this movement emerge reflections that may take the form of words, lines drawn on paper, music, or else. I freely draw nourishment from the natural world, intellectual endeavour and artistic creations, particularly music, which for me is a way to catch a glimpse of the whole within the singular.
Regarding the drawings: Everything here relates to my tremors and the internal states that influence their intensity. For several years now, I’ve been living with focal dystonia in my left hand — an involuntary nerve contraction that prevents me from writing with it. To help with this, in 2018, my friends gave me an old and beautiful 1920 Underwood No.5 typewriter. This antique machine invites a reconsideration of our relationship to language and time, particularly through its confrontation with error — the sudden appearance of what was not intended on the page.
One winter evening in 2019, I let a pen wander freely across a sheet of paper, holding it only with my fingertips, without trying to control its involuntary movements. The dystonia-induced tension reflex wasn’t triggered. The resulting lines fluctuated with my tremors — like transcriptions of my nervous system onto paper. I decided to add some text using the Underwood, usually composed spontaneously, so that my intrusive thoughts wouldn’t interfere too much. Before me appeared a strange equilibrium: a meeting between spasmodic, unpredictable lines and the mechanical regularity of typed ones. The tools, the medium, and what emerges from them merge.
It’s an intimate kind of seismography, leaving the trace of its own trajectory on the surface of things — a record of what happened in that moment. I never quite know what the next mark will bring, and each new line is an attempt to rebalance the previous one. Nothing is meticulous, controlled, or strictly ordered: it is a deliberate embrace of imperfection, and things reveal themselves in the process. Like drone music, it is a state of continuous vibration. At its essence, this work is an ongoing experiment — a space of trial, error, and emergence.
Over time, this practice has become a vital dialogue with the unconscious — its substance revealed to me through the hand. I need it to carry things through: to make mistakes and tirelessly recompose the whole; to have a constantly renewed opportunity to persist — or not — in a direction, with no consequence other than the modification of the drawing in progress, or its abrupt end. Since living in the Cariboo, I have extended this practice to painting and engraving, some of which can also be seen here today.”
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