There is always a little trick that works in the head. The little thing got in there by looking at a painting by Matisse, a film by Xavier Dolan, by reading a book by Christian Bobin, by looking at something, someone, by catching a question that someone else asked and which go on living alone...

The little thing works and then we see the whole world feeding it. Everything seems connected. It's a matter of perspective. We then knit stories, we link things to each other, we try to give them meaning.

For next summer's women's jewelry collection, I fed on topics that have been talked about a lot lately: Identity, DNA research, cultural appropriation. So I inevitably ask myself the question: "What about me? What am I in all this? What group do I belong to? »

I look at the others around me, their way of doing things, their flags, their research, their migrations, their inner revolts, their music, their sneakers, their style, their words, what makes them who they are.

I drift, I look at home, I look at what I am made of and I see childhood memories in the countryside, memories of trips to discover the world, of unexpected encounters, of words exchanged one evening on the St. Martin and I tell myself that I am the mixture of all these memories. I then hear Alex Beaupain's song "Je suis un souvenir" and I tell myself that this is an identity, a patchwork: lots of little pieces of fabric stuck together.

I have a woven basket at home with scraps of multicolored fabric left over from different projects: the liberty dress that my grandmother sewed me for my 10th birthday, a piece of wax brought back from Niger in 2006 and which I I had made a cushion in my first Parisian apartment, the pink fabric hand-dyed by Mauritanian women which served as a sheet for my dolls and as a sarong at the beach, the piece of red gingham which serves as a summer tablecloth for picnics, a toile de Jouy for an applied arts study project, a shiny emerald green synthetic fabric for a mermaid costume… All are fragments of my story.

I look at my library and there too the books tell of my paths crossed. Could a library be an identity? What's yours ?

I thought of the attic full of treasures in our family home in the country. From my brother's toy box filled with Playmobil, to the piles of books stuffed in old boxes, to the costume trunk containing fabrics brought back from travels by my father, my mother's childhood clothes, my grandmother's hats -mother… I remember the summer afternoons in the grass when we dressed in these marvels to play roles. A red cloche hat met a Persian shirt, a few plastic beads from the 80s completed the paraphernalia and a daisy in my ear, I became someone else. Would the identity like to disguise itself as a stranger or is my identity a stranger?

I sought to bring it all together: the African motif, the plastic toy, the flowers in the garden, to create my own motif, my flag, my bouquet of flowers, my composition.

I sketched the objects, and I made a collection of jewelry for women because it is the channel that I have used for several years to express all this. So I designed necklaces to accumulate, fine rings, signet rings, mismatched earrings, bangles that tell this story, my childhood memories. The silver and bronze patchwork has become a collection of jewelry handcrafted by Tuareg artisans from my designs. They worked in the fire to shape the patterns into volumes, they struck, engraved, sanded, polished the metals. The patterns were born in Paris, the jewels were born in Niger. I then assembled the silver and bronze elements and adorned them with seed beads, mottled beads, gold or silver chains to give you "the memories".

The collection becomes our common identity for the duration of a summer season and in your hands, you who wear our jewels, new bouquets will be composed... Yours, ours, a patchwork that we can now share.