Mariane Stratis

Swaying between fictional and farcical, my work explores the cultural experience that surrounds the event of death. Through installations, sculpture, photography, textile, space becomes a performative pretext for generating bizarre situations designed to activate or trigger the visitor’s embodied presence. Impermanence, obsolescence, nostalgia, the process of acceptance, projection, anticipation, relationships and discomfort related to the experience of loss animate my research. I am particularly interested in individual or collective memory; what we choose to keep and what we reject. I linger on the metaphysical longevity of things and memories, more specifically to the notion of legacy: what remains of identity when the physical and material have disappeared. The tracing of the rectangle of a coffin is a repeating pattern throughout my installations; confronting the visitor to imagine their body occupying its final resting space. Gliding between play and poetry, I use deflections or detours to create situational fantasies that question the various cults related to the event of death.

Interdisciplinary artist Mariane Stratis holds a BFA in Visual and Media Arts from Université du Québec à Montréal (2015). Stratis is the founder of doux soft club (2017), a collective of artist-curators that takes an active interest in the struggles related to collaboration and contamination, and research on care and wellbeing. They use an array of textiles and architectural concepts to reimagine a whimsical version of society. Stratis has completed residencies in France and Canada, countries where her work as also been exhibited in venues such as AXENEO7, Verticale, Artch, Puces N°5, B-312 Gallery, GHAM & DAFE and Art Mûr Gallery.