I work with photography, performance, film attempting to create a conversation between individual pieces I produce as well as using them as independent entities, within the installational work I observe the instability of representation via the porosity of images, the dynamics of surfaces creating dimensional images ; within the films I explore the idea of juxtaposition and performativity of materials further within the use of subjects and their sense of absence and alienation in a given space ; on the other hand with the performances I directly explore the idea of the body as material. I intentionally add layers to highlight the complexity of the reading of images, intertextuality or the potential of references play an important role ; the work of French writer Marguerite Duras was a great influence in the ways she deconstructed texts but also expanded their content through other forms. The narrativity of content and the narrativity of form are always in a dialogue through the media I engage with, again within an independent piece as well as juxtaposed ones.

My work has been greatly influenced by the work of David Hammons, Lili Dujourie, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Chantal Akerman but above all by Marguerite Duras.

In the past few years, I have rigorously concentrated on Marguerite Duras and her relation to writing, films, and her repetition and condensation of the story of absolute love which she practically removes from the text and sets up as a universal memory for the reader/viewer to rewrite, transporting the story to new narrative regions. Her example of translating life’s experience into representation, as much as the way she sustains, renders desire and memory through her themes and form in a parallel axis, constitute the core of my practice, being myself from the French west-indies, having been brought up in France and being now in Holland after having lived in London, the notion of space, belonging as much as absence and alienation are problematics that constantly question the centre of my work, where doubts and fragmentation as well as repetition
are dynamics.

I investigate the relation between imaging, and the body in the form of research around the body and its redundancy in respect to different media, by producing performances, performances for the video as well as films, I explore the failure of processes of identification, their limit but also through productivity, the possibility of their constant reinscription into new and different meaning.

—Jimmy Robert