Nicolas Cilins (they/them) practice brings together people and archives through moving image, sound, and performances. It is inseparable from the relationships that sustain it, exploring coexistence as a factual, lived, and desiring condition. Through linguistic, cultural, and affective translation, they investigate how collective bodies are formed, how stories circulate, and how we learn to care for one another.
Most of the people they work with are not artists, but neighbours, amateurs, therapists, mediums, museum staff, online workers, or people encountered through chance meetings and sustained research.
At Künstlerhaus Bethanien, they are developing Tap To Unmute, a new body of work that reflects on the digital afterlives of queer and trans people: what remains of a life as it continues to circulate online, what these lives continue to ask of us, and how these digital traces might be reclaimed through collective rituals.