My first thought, upon visiting my apartment, was to imagine it as the perfect set for my next genre film. Somewhere between a fever dream by Dario Argento and a baroque vision by Mario Bava.

Uninhabited for fourteen years, frozen in the 1990s, the apartment seemed to have been left there, as if suspended in time. In the girl’s bedroom,  painted purple,  lay ballet slippers and posters of Amy Winehouse, Heath Ledger, and Marilyn Monroe: hypersensitive icons taken too soon... hanging on the walls like relics of adolescence. On the front door, covered in marker scribbles, the words were carefully inscribed in an almost perfect “teenage” font: I Love L.A. and Emo Forever.

I instantly felt a special bond with the ghosts of this place, and I knew this was where I would settle.
 In this strange outgrowth from the 1960s, grafted onto the fourth floor of a 1930s building designed by Dimitris Pikionis,  the mythical figure of minimalist Greek architecture and admirer of Le Corbusier. Strangely, it all contrasted with my taste for the flamboyant and the fantastical…

So... Welcome to Pinkionis!!! (Imagine the voice of a glamorous, mysterious young woman, a tribute to David Lynch ; Perhaps the voice of the girl singing I’ve Told Every Little Star by Linda Scott (1961) in Mulholland Drive (2001)).

The works by Leonor Fini, Sylvie Fleury, Agata Ingarden, Malvina Panagiotidi, and Theo Triantafyllidis, which I present in my living space, each echo in their own way the notion of fetishism.

They enter into dialogue with several paintings from my series Moulin Rouge – Zombie Girls (2024), as well as with the sculptures and installations that populate my apartment.


Among them, our bed, designed in collaboration with Markos Mazarakis-Ainian,  occupies a central place: a tribute to the film Carnival of Souls (1962, Herk Harvey), both an intimate sanctuary and a spectral object.

I live at the top of Filis Street. The street of brothels.
Here, sex workers don’t pose proudly in fur coats like sphinxes bearing the weight of men’s desires, outside their doorways or love hotels, as they do below my uncle’s apartment on Rue Saint-Denis in Paris, where I stay when passing through — Passage du Caire. Nor like in a Fellini or Almodóvar film.

These women are, for the most part, locked inside and barricaded behind shuttered windows.
As my neighbor,  who also walks around the neighbourhood with a badly-mannered chihuahua, puts it: “They are stolen from their countries, then prostituted.”

The Moulin Rouge – Zombie Girls painting series may be the storyboard for the genre film I dream of making at Pinkionis. And the faces, the souls of these female characters I paint may become the future avenging, man-eating zombies of this patriarchal, prostituting system.

They sit like queens amid the ruins of cliché postcard sets, relics of fallen Western empires and fantasy locales. Thus, the Moulin Rouge and neoclassical Greek villas melt like a cartoon under the heat of an apocalyptic sky worthy of a Hollywood movie. Wrath of the nymphs and goddesses.

Perhaps they will choose a techno remix of the French cancan as their cult anthem.  A reworking of Offenbach’s Infernal Galop from Orpheus in the Underworld, considered the first feminist dance in France, with gestures and steps that mocked and rebelled against the Church and authority.

Have I become a utopian? No. But I never forget that humor always saves me.

In my work, everything is intimately linked to my love for cinema. The works by the artists I selected for this exhibition reference cinematic language, interrogate systems of domination and control, and challenge power structures imposed by an elitist Western society, through representations of the self.

Malvina Panagiotidi’s piece Why do you imagine golden birds? II (2024) sits like a haunted house on its black perch, a nod to the classic intro scenes of B-movies. The house is made of pink wax, like the kind sold in sex shops for BDSM play, or votive candles said to soothe hypersensitivity.

But in Why do you imagine golden birds? II, only the foundations remain. Perhaps an evocation of the ruins of Athens’ neoclassical palaces, or the skeletal buildings left unfinished after the crisis. You can find them all around the neighbourhood, where their terracotta rooftops,  often adorned with decorative women’s faces — serve as nests and shelters for small birds. As a “good witch,” Malvina Panagiotidi seems to conjure time’s fatality through pleasure and illusion, returning poetry to these ruins. By transforming them back into organic matter through wax, her sculptures become a passage between two worlds,  perhaps between the living and the dead.

Theo Triantafyllidis’s work Feral Metaverse (2025) is installed in the pink lobby, evoking arcade booths or one-way mirror cabins for solitary play. Like an homage to Nastassja Kinski’s outfit in Paris, Texas (1985, Wim Wenders), with her angelic blonde hair and pink sweater.

In the video game created by Triantafyllidis, human bodies are used by other humans like tiny racehorses. Here, bodies entwine into a human pyramid, like in The House That Jack Built (2018, Lars Von Trier), where the serial killer, obsessed with The Raft of the Medusa (1819, Théodore Géricault), slaughters in pursuit of a maximalist artwork made of corpses. Mocking the power hierarchies of a dystopian society with Mad Max-style aesthetics (George Miller saga), Feral Metaverse (2025) can also be played multiplayer,  perhaps a utopian attempt to reconnect our minds and bodies, indoctrinated by the individualism of social media and the internet.

Les Petites Filles modèles by Leonor Fini, erotic engravings from 1973, feature girls riding each other just like in Theo’s Feral Metaverse. Leonor Fini, inspired by the Countess of Ségur’s novel, subverts the archetype of the “little girl model” into libertine nymphets or Lolitas.

Leonor Fini, often her own muse, glorifies and deifies assertive femininity, notably through portraits and self-portraits. But in this engraving series, female bodies are debased, reduced to mere sexual objects. Their staging reinforces the theme of fetishism, especially when one considers how the Countess of Ségur darkly alluded to adult cruelty and child abuse.

Agata Ingarden’s piece The Bow (2022) is the instrument used to “play” her work Sleeping Beauty Corp. (2022) (or is it corpse?). Ingarden’s Sleeping Beauty seems to align more with Julia Leigh’s 2011 film than Disney’s 1959 version.

Sleeping Beauty Corp. (2022) could be the body of a young woman levitating on a shroud-bed. Her soul and body gone, her skeleton hovering like above a desecrated tomb, perhaps the remains of a rebellious princess who refused the idea that only a man’s kiss could wake her.

The Bow (2022) even evokes a scorpion’s shape, its tail raised and ready to strike. Yet, like in a sci- fi film, perhaps the memory of this princess has been wiped, and this floating body, disconnected from its wounds, now moves to sound, not to the neurotic I Have Seen You Upon a Dream, but to Blade Runner Blues by Vangelis.

In the video piece Drastic Make-Up (2007), a pimped-up vintage American car,  driverless and cartoonish, as if from Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988, Robert Zemeckis),  bounces frenetically over luxury makeup products. Armed with a club, the artist smashes powders and mascaras, her bejeweled hands and polished feet in high heels are barely visible.

Ornamentation is the signature of Sylvie Fleury, the punk diva of luxury and post-Warhol icon, whose work centres on the display of objects loaded with aesthetic, sentimental (and sometimes sexual or fetishistic) value.

The video is shown in the pink-and-black Hollywood-glam bathroom, echoing Cuddly Painting (1997) displayed above the golden faucets. If this piece nods to my Material Girl (1984, Madonna) lioness side, I believe it also pays tribute to the woman who passes by my place every day, in a convertible Smart car, blasting oriental music, with bleached blonde hair, false lashes, glossy lips, long pink claw-like nails, and gleaming gold jewellery.

Café freddo?

Lucile Littot