SKM

SKM has been immersed for many years in a creative process that delicately intertwines drawing, painting, and writing to express a vision that is both intimate and political.

How do you view your own work?

“I look at my works in the same way I listen to music… allowing my immediate sensations to resonate within me. It is up to each viewer to discover their own resonance when contemplating them. I often use the concept of territories to express specific ideas, political or philosophical positions, and emotions through form and color. These are the territories that define us: physical, biological, climatic, cultural, historical, political, philosophical, sovereign, and connected—as well as familial, romantic, and intimate.

Being aware of the territories I inhabit or traverse means acknowledging that I—or we—may need to embrace ‘deterritorialization... the abandonment of habit, of a sedentary state. More precisely, it is about escaping alienation and specific processes of subjectivation’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972).”

Indeed, a territory is not merely a geographical space. It is everything that stabilizes us: habits (ways of thinking, living, and creating), social roles (professional, familial, cultural), identities (national, artistic, emotional), and mental frameworks (norms, beliefs, and expectations). A territory provides a sense of security and orientation, but it can also be confining.

Moving toward deterritorialization means leaving behind what fixes us in place. It is the moment one leaves a territory, whether voluntarily or not. This may involve changing countries, languages, or cultures; questioning a fixed identity; stepping outside an artistic style or a familiar framework of thought; or breaking away from automatic ways of living and creating. It is not necessarily comfortable: reference points are lost, but a space for movement opens up.

This process is about escaping alienation. Alienation is not only external oppression; it also lies in living according to imposed patterns, thinking and acting within socio-cultural frameworks, and defining oneself solely through existing categories. One then becomes a stranger to oneself, even when everything appears “normal.” Deterritorialization thus allows for a break from what confines us, often without our full awareness.

It therefore involves engaging with processes of subjectivation—how one becomes a “subject”—that is, the mechanisms through which society, culture, institutions, and language shape our ways of being. These processes are not always violent, but they are normative. Escaping certain processes of subjectivation does not mean rejecting all identity; it means refusing to be entirely defined by a single form of identity.

To be aware of the territories I inhabit is to understand that, in order to remain alive, creative, and free, I must sometimes accept leaving behind what is familiar, breaking with habits or fixed identities to escape forms of alienation and the models that dictate who I should be.

In my artistic practice, this idea translates into refusing a fixed style, exploring hybrid forms, and making art a space of passage rather than a closed territory. Art becomes an open experience—something we move through, that we leave changed. The artwork is not a passive object of contemplation, but a process that generates movement.

Awareness of the territories one traverses thus implies a voluntary detachment from established reference points, freeing the artistic gesture from norms and prescribed roles.