We play different roles depending on the spheres in which we move. We do not play the same role when we talk to our mother or our boss, our children, our friends, a neighbour or someone we meet in the street. That is the dynamic that interests me.

My starting point is real facts that I have observed in everyday life or stories that have been told to me. I take these situations to the extreme to lay bare aspects that may be funny, absurd, strange, and often even cruel.

And then there are the stories of impostors. Four people who really existed. Some are still alive. There is Misha Defonseca, a Belgian author who wrote a book that purported to be a true story. In it, she recounted how, at the age of 7, she walked across Europe during the Second World War, protected by wolves, seeking her parents who had been taken away by the Nazis. There is Rosie Ruiz, a Cuban American marathon runner who cheated at the 1979 New York and 1980 Boston marathons. She completed both races without running the full distance by jumping into the course a short distance before the finish. At the time, there were no GPS trackers or any other athlete monitoring system. Which is how she managed to fake victory. But the ruse was exposed when, asked about her sporting feat, she gave answers riddled with inconsistencies, and she was stripped of her crown. Frédéric Bourdin is a serial impostor from France who assumed hundreds of teenage identities by the age of 30 – either missing minors or fictional identities. From 1990 to 2005, he managed to ingratiate himself into homes for abandoned teenagers, and from there into foster families. He is trilingual and a phenomenal mimic. And the most recent: Claas Relotius, a former German journalist who worked for Der Spiegel. A rising star whose reporting prowess had garnered him many accolades. Until December 2018, when, at the age of 33, he confessed to falsifying fifteen of the articles that had made him famous.

What fascinates me about these impostors is, naturally, the need that they have to make people believe things so they can occupy a role, but it is also the credulity of the world when fed these lies. What mechanisms are used to pull the wool over people’s eyes? What are we willing to believe in order to get by, to survive in a group, in the community? What do we need to believe in? I interweave these “extraordinary” stories with more everyday sequences because there are human behaviours in our daily lives – personal, professional, social – that are just as striking as those of proven impostors. In this way, I can explore the need that drives us to believe in the stories we tell ourselves and others.

— Interview by Sophie Dupavé le 17 octobre 2019