INTERVIEW Michelle Michewicz
PUBLISHED 13 AUG 26
With a background in software engineering F.ragmen.t’s work sits at the crossroads of memory, perception, and computer-driven systems, expressed through generative visuals, moving image, and immersive digital environments.
// How would you describe your artistic practice?
I wouldn’t describe myself primarily as an artist. My background is in software engineering, but my interests have always been strongly connected to cinema, moving images, music, and digital practices.
I’m particularly drawn to the poetry that can exist in ordinary moments: a gesture, a light, a conversation, a face, a sound, or an image that suddenly becomes a memory. A lot of my work comes from observing these small fragments and experimenting with ways to transform them.
Because of my technical background, I feel comfortable moving between different tools and mediums. I can build things, code, experiment with interactive systems, work with images and sound, and use technology almost as a material for research. For me, the important part is less about defining a medium and more about experimenting and seeing where an idea can take me.
// Which moment of the creative process do you enjoy the most?
Probably the moment when I don’t really know what I’m doing yet. I enjoy experimenting, trying something that might not work, breaking it, changing it, and suddenly finding something unexpected. Sometimes a technical problem becomes an aesthetic decision, or a random image or sound opens a completely different direction. That uncertainty is probably the most exciting part for me.
// How do you know when a work is finished?
I’m not sure I ever completely know. At some point, I feel that the work has started to exist on its own and that I don’t need to explain everything around it anymore. When I can step back and simply experience it, rather than constantly thinking about how to change it, I usually feel that it’s ready. But I also like leaving some things unresolved. Memories themselves are never really finished.
// What conversations do you hope your work will start?
I’m interested in conversations around memory, perception, absence, and the way we construct our own relationship with the past.
I don’t necessarily want the work to give people a specific interpretation. I would rather have someone see something completely different from what I had in mind and connect it to their own experience. For me, that personal connection is already a meaningful conversation.
// Can you describe a personal experience that made you think about entanglement?
I think a lot about how personal memories are never really isolated. A family story, a place, a song, a photograph, or even a small everyday gesture can carry memories that belong to several people at once. You might remember something because someone else remembers it, or because a place keeps triggering the same feeling years later. That made me think about memory as something entangled: personal and collective memories constantly overlap, influence each other, and create new versions of the past.
// What would you like people to take away after seeing your work?
Maybe not a specific message, but a feeling.
I would like people to leave with something that stays with them for a little while; maybe a memory they had forgotten, an image, a sound, or even a question.
I like the idea that the work continues to exist somewhere in their memory after they leave the space.
// What question would you like people to ask you about your work?
I’d probably like someone to ask: “Where does the memory in this work actually belong?”
Is it mine? Is it the island’s? Is it the person experiencing the work? Or does it become something different when all of these things meet?
I think that question opens up a lot of what I’m interested in.
// What are you currently curious about?
I’m very curious about the relationship between memory and technology, especially how digital images and sounds can change the way we remember things. I’m also exploring real-time systems, generative processes, interactive installations, and ways of making technology feel less mechanical and more organic.
At the moment, I’m particularly interested in live coding music and how it can connect with visual practices. I’m experimenting with the idea of having sound, code, visuals, and memory constantly influencing each other in real time — where a live-coded sound can trigger or transform an image, and where the visual memory can somehow respond back to the music.
I’m interested in finding a space where these disciplines meet rather than keeping them separate. And beyond the technical side, I’m still very curious about simple things: everyday images, sounds, places, people, and the poetry that exists in moments we normally overlook.
// What is your contribution to SEE DJERBA 2026, and how does it connect to this year’s theme, AKROS?
My contribution is an interactive installation exploring the relationship between personal and collective memory through the landscape of Djerba.
I worked with personal recordings of family, friends, and everyday life, and brought them together with images connected to the shared cultural memory of the island. The work is activated through the visitor’s gaze and movement. A projected eye and delayed shadows respond to their presence, creating a kind of living relationship between the visitor, the image, and the space.
The idea of AKROSS, the knot, really resonates with the work because I see memory itself as a form of entanglement. Personal memories are connected to places, people, stories, sounds, images, and collective histories. You can’t always separate where one memory ends and another begins.
Djerba became an important part of that process. The island carries so many layers of history, culture, craft, landscape, family stories, and everyday life. I wanted to work with these layers without trying to simply document them.
The installation is more like an attempt to create another thread between them — between the personal and the collective, the past and the present, the real and the remembered. The visitor then becomes another thread in that network. Their movement changes the work, so every encounter creates a slightly different version of it.