An artistic and scientific project: Cellular Portraits by Laurence Graffensttaden

What if the living could be transformed into art — and the invisible turned into emotion?
This is the vision behind Cellular Portraits, a project led by the artist duo Laurence & Graffensttaden and expanded through an original sound dimension created by composer Simon Choini (Université de Montréal) and researcher Katia Djerroud.

The journey begins with a simple gesture: a saliva sample. Through Papanicolaou staining and advanced microscopy, human cells unfold into vibrant, colorful, singular images. Each participant appears through an abstract yet intimate “cellular portrait,” celebrating what makes us all alike and all different.

But the project now reaches beyond the human body. By integrating microscopic images of plant cells, Cellular Portraits brings human and vegetal matter into dialogue — revealing how closely intertwined our forms, patterns and rhythms can be. The living world becomes a shared canvas.

To this visual work, an innovative sonic exploration is added. Simon Choini develops a sonification of both human and plant cellular data, converting characteristics such as size, shape, brightness and color into musical parameters. In collaboration with Katia Djerroud, PhD candidate in AI and emotion analysis, he uses software capable of automatically extracting visual information and transforming it into sound.

The result: audiovisual creations in which scientific observation meets artistic interpretation, and where the boundaries between species dissolve.

Echoing Édouard Glissant’s ideas on creolization and the “Tout-Monde,” the project invites us to reconsider our relationship to the living, to diversity, and to our multiple identities — human and more-than-human. It reminds us that difference does not separate; it connects.

Originally developed with the Institut du Monde Arabe as part of La classe, l’œuvre !, Cellular Portraits now opens new pathways: merging human and plant cells, bridging East and West, and creating artworks that nurture dialogue, hope, ecological responsibility and new forms of relational sensitivity.