A central starting point for my work is examining my roots and how they influence the process of building up my personal and artistic identity. In the early sixties my grandfather, artist George Remponeau gradually moved his family to New York as living in the dictator-led Haiti had become alarmingly dangerous. My Swiss father met my Haitian-born mother in New York in the early seventies. I was born and grew up in Zurich, Switzerland but nowadays I live and work in Helsinki, Finland.

Being of mixed-heritage Haitian and European roots, unable to visit my mother's homeland  - Haiti - because of security risks, I ally myself with the Caribbean Diaspora. I want to express political criticism by combining it with an aesthetic rendering of the subject matter.

I started off my identity work feeling upset with the historical injustice embedded in colonialism. Shooting back is a triptych portrait of, first of all, Christopher Columbus – the Western hero who killed 3 to 4 million Arawak Indians after arriving in 1492 in Hispaniola, later called Haiti. The two other personas in the work are the Haitian dictators ‘Papa Doc’ and his son ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier. I fired some 80 000 staples with a staple gun on found driftwood – my revenge was to literally nail the dictators. I later applied the same technique to other works, like the portrait of the executor of North American Indians and black people, the last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam (1647–1664), Peter Stuyvesant.

My attitude to work has transformed from anger management towards a quest for understanding, like in the case with endangered gorillas as a subject. I am also striving for a more interactive dialogue by means of intervention. Flying to Agassizhorn, a mountain in the Swiss Alps named after the Swiss naturalist and racist Louis Agassiz, and renaming it Rentyhorn after a slave he used in his research was one such action. My art became part of the international anti-racist campaign De-mountain Louis Agassiz, an effort to rename the mountain Rentyhorn for good and thus reshape collective identities.