Plinth

“We began collaborating with TiChan when she contacted us in the summer of 2018. She was just at the beginning of a long journey to change from Thibaut to Charlotte and wanted the process to be documented. It would take many years before the physical transition would be complete and the psychological and social changes would take even longer. We committed to follow the journey all the way through and she suggested that we call her TiChan as an in-between name, a bit of Thibaut and a bit of Charlotte. In many ways we consider ourselves to be three directors of the project.

We have been documenting the physical changes as they take place in TiChan’s body, but the physical changes represent only one dimension of the transformation, and the questions around personal identity have come to the foreground. We began to explore the emotional world of Thibaut’s past, shaped by denial, suppression, anger and the overriding feeling of being in the wrong body.

The first iteration of this project was a three-screen installation that was shown at the Nuit Blanche in Paris in 2019. Since then, we have continued to collaborate, though the process has been delayed by the covid years. The work consists of documentary film, still images, written testimony, and continues to grow and expand as we work together.”

Olivia Arthur & Philipp Ebeling