This performance began on the island of Ré. During my initial wanderings, an object caught my attention at the edge of a path, half-buried in sand: a seemingly robust yet lightweight bamboo stick. Without hesitation, I picked it up and instantly transformed it into a walking companion—a Pavlovian gesture for a long-distance walker. However, after one or two days of intense walking, the stick began showing signs of fragility. A thin crack had formed, threatening its integrity. Seeking to preserve my valuable ally, the environment offered me a solution.

Among the island’s scattered debris, a hairband appeared on the side of a path. I picked up this artifact and carefully wrapped it around the bamboo’s crack, reinforcing its structure. As I continued exploring the island, I discovered an abundance of hairbands littering the cycling paths. I collected a second one to further strengthen my stick, then another, and yet another. A ritual was born.

Returning to Paris, the ritual continued. Each hairband is now carefully gathered. Thus, as I walk the Parisian streets, I collect fragments of life, elements of a story still being written, pieces of an ever-evolving mosaic. These artifacts, akin to strands of DNA—biological receptacles and traces of human existence—are documented, cataloged, and geolocated on an online map, creating an archive in progress. This ritual, born of chance and necessity, has become a form of moving meditation, alternating between steps and gestures.

In this sensory experience, where each hairband embodies a syllable of a silent, polysemic language, the act of wrapping the artifact around the bamboo resonates with the initial gesture that animated it. Thus, I reactivate the original purpose of the hairband—tightening and fastening—but in a new context and with a different intention, creating a duality of gestures and meanings.

The process also illustrates the gradual transition from quantity to quality: repetition in collecting hairbands, accumulation as they wrap around the bamboo, and compression as they are arranged. The hairbands thus become a skin, condensed matter gathered through space and time, contributing to the slow transmutation of the stick into a totem.

This totem is a heterogeneous assemblage of manufactured objects, organic materials, rituals, stories, and human traces. It emerges not only as an ever-evolving artwork but also as a sensory mapping and a living archive. It becomes a crossroads where the intimate and the public, the individual and the collective, the functional and the symbolic meet and transform each other.

During my collections, I recalled the wanderings of André Cadere, a conceptual artist from the 1970s who walked through Paris with his “Round Wooden Bars,” cylindrical sticks composed of colored segments. Cadere’s approach involved bringing art out of conventional spaces: he exhibited outdoors, displaying his work while walking. His practice relied on a precise protocol—arranging colors according to a mathematical system—but deliberately introducing an “error” in each bar, breaking order and introducing imperfection. Similarly, with my performance “Bambou totémique mouvant,” I walk and exhibit a work. However, unlike Cadere’s predetermined color choices, my quest allows chance to determine the characteristics of the hairbands—colors, textures, sizes—making each totem unique. This artwork can only be realized through walking.

In short, “Bambou totémique mouvant” traces lines of flight through the fabric of reality. It’s an action arranging traces and revealing interconnections between human existences. This rhizomatic artwork sits at the intersection of art, geography, and anthropology. Oscillating between ritual and exploration, the sobriety of gestures and simplicity of found objects, this performance draws a cartography of intimacy in public space. It is within this convergence of elements that the totem finds its full meaning.

The totem becomes the very embodiment of these walks.