Writer, I have published a dozen books. In 2015, I had begun a dialogue between literature and medicine with the book Anomalie des zones profondes du cerveau [Abnormalities in deep brain areas], Grasset.

I am also a performance artist who likes to give incarnated forms (sometimes funny, often digressive) to knowledge (scientific, historical, literary …).

Le Service des Panacées, The Panacea Service, continues and expands this dialogue between medicine and literature.

The Panacea Service, is a literary creation and transmission structure with three objectives:

1) To offer consultations in which, during an exchange, the person in charge of the Panacea Service that I am prescribes books.

I ask people who sign up for a consultation to state a “trouble”, in advance of our consultation, by e-mail.

The term “trouble” is important. It’s not a symptom, not a disorder and not necessarily a problem. A trouble can be positive…

I respond to this trouble by prescribing books, with their dosage, indicating, for example, the rhythm of reading, according to the discussion I’ve had with the person in consultation.

I write this prescription on a prescription pad, checking that the book is available in the bookshop.

I invite people who have come for a consultation to send me feedback after the treatment.

I created my personal Hippocratic oath for the Panacea Service. The approach is resolutely artistic, but of course it also has an ethical dimension.

Between 2023 and 2025, I received around 130 people for literary consultations. These were developed in collaboration with cultural institutions: the Villa Medici (Rome, Italy), the Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), the Frac Sud (“regional contemporary art fund” Marseille, France), La Marelle (literary residence, Marseille, France), the Centre Wallonie Bruxelles (Paris, France), the 7L library (Paris, France), and the Lektos festival (Bastia, Corsica, France).

The main form is private literary consultations. I sometimes offer performances in the form of public literary consultations. You can see several photos taken in the various consultation rooms of the Panacea Service here.

2) The second objective of the Panacea Service is to build up a corpus, a medical dictionary of literature. In other words to read or revisit books through a grid freely inspired by medical models. Obviously, this is a long-term project.

3) Finally, the Panacea Service creates art forms based on the history of representations of the body in medicine. These sculptures grew out of this research, in particular medieval methods of treatment, as I’m also writing a novel set in the medical school of Salerno (Italy) in the 12th century.

• Scarification : SCARIFICATURE

For me, the active principles I apply are literary, so I embroider book titles on skins or realistic reproductions of body parts made in silicone. The metaphorical aspect is important, which is why I only work with synthetic elements.

• Ritual care dolls : DAGALIBRI

We often think of voodoo dolls, but in ancient times, dolls representing the human body were also used for healing.

I embroider book titles in red thread on these dolls called Dagalibri, each doll representing a therapeutic unit.

I chose to represent my own handwriting, which creates a link with the prescriptions of the Panacea Service, also written in manuscript. Indeed, Dagalibri is a personal, almost secret object between the person in charge of the Panacea Service and the patient-reader.

An audio file, recorded in ASMR, reveals the titles and authors, reinforcing this effect of confidentiality.