The series has two roots. The first: a solo journey of 1,600 kilometres through four countries in the spring of 2021 — alone, sleeping in dark forests, no dog, no company. The internal rupture that journey produced is recorded in the Post-COVID Series. What it left behind, in the body, was a new relationship to forest nights and what moves in them. The second root arrived later: my dog, and the camping trips we began making together after the lockdown — live drawings in the dark, my dog sensing what I could not see. The Monas and Tent Visions grew from that accumulation.

Enlightenment automata aimed for perfection. They demonstrated that living organisms could be understood as machines by surpassing human precision. Through crude mechanics — an off-center weight, irregular cams — my automata invert that logic: they capture what a perfect mechanism was designed to eliminate: hesitation, vulnerability, the constant tremor of being a living organism. The mechanism produces sound and movement as the same act. Each Mona has its own sonic world, determined by the objects it sets in motion. The question isn't whether the automaton feels — it's why such simple motion, and such simple sound, makes us feel seen.

The drawings do something different: they attempt to follow what my dog perceived, translating signals I could not access into marks on paper — a translation of something that was never available to me directly, only sensed through her.

I want to evoke the world as it flickered through his hyper-perception: a realm of nano-signals and silent turbulences beyond human sight. The visions of my dog are my dreams while camping in a tent — my cave, my shelter, my house, the uterus, in the middle of the forest. Meanwhile, the Monas don't know they tremble. That is precisely the question.