Michel Jocaille is a multidisciplinary artist born in 1987. Coming from a textile industrial background in northern France, he weaves a dialogue between industrial heritage and cultural patrimony. The gestures learned in the domestic sphere—ranging from crochet and spool knitting to canvas work—respond to the factories; these repetitive and patient practices, long relegated to decoration, are repositioned by the artist at the center, conceiving textile as a trace of productive valleys. Glass captures fragility, and motifs repeat like a heartbeat.
He develops installations and sculptures composed of assemblages of heterogeneous materials. His work is rooted in a camp aesthetic, embracing artificiality, exaggeration, and a certain theatricality of gesture. Drawing on references to fluidity and hybridization, Michel Jocaille questions identity constructions and the normative narratives that underpin them. His approach combines artistic research and critical reflection, aiming to subvert value hierarchies, blur systems of interpretation, and overturn imposed classifications. In doing so, it unfolds a visual thinking from the margins, attentive to the forms of power embedded in representations.
He lives and works in Paris and obtained a DNSEP from ésaä NPdC – Hauts-de-France in 2015. His work has been presented at the 68th Salon de Montrouge (2025), the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles (Paris), Galerie du 19 M Chanel (Paris), and the Collection Lambert in Avignon. In 2024, he was invited by La Samaritaine in Paris to create a window installation on rue de Rivoli, on the theme of the winter garden.
He has participated in several residencies and public commissions in the Paris region and Hauts-de-France, as well as in international creative programs, notably at Wicar in Rome, Dot in Berlin, Villa Therapeia in Paxos, and most recently at Les Sheds in Pantin.