Why I started DYSKINESIAA

Before the studio

I grew up in Paris, born in 2004, in a household where the walls were always covered in something. Drawings, half finished canvases, prints from museum shops, postcards taped to the back of doors. My parents never told me what to look at, but they made sure there was always something to look at. I think that is where the obsession started, this need to make objects that have a presence in a room even when nobody is wearing them or holding them.

For a long time I did not know what I wanted to make. I drew a lot. I sculpted in clay during a brief period in lycée. I tried furniture, then garments, then ceramics. Nothing held me for long. The materials were either too forgiving or too far from the body. Clay can be reshaped indefinitely. Fabric drapes around its mistakes. I wanted something less negotiable, something that would force me to commit to a decision. Silver does that. You cut, you melt, you cast. You do not undo a casting. You can re do the whole piece, but you cannot rewind it.

The pull toward anatomy came earlier than I admit publicly. As a child I used to copy plates from old medical atlases at the library, the kind with cross sections of muscle and bone, lines so dense they looked like landscapes. I was not interested in medicine. I was interested in how a body looks when it is described as a structure rather than a person. The vertebrae in particular fascinated me. Each one is a small architectural element. Stacked, they become a column. Pulled apart, they become objects. That tension between the singular unit and the assembled whole is something I think about constantly when I design.

The first prototype

I started DYSKINESIAA officially in 2024, but the first piece existed before the name did. It was a Verteber Ring prototype, carved in green wax on a folding table in my bedroom, before I had access to a real bench. I remember the wax was the wrong hardness. It crumbled on the underside when I tried to thin the band. I kept the broken version on my desk for weeks, because the way it had failed was more interesting than how I had planned it to look.

The second attempt held. I cast it in silver through a small foundry in the eleventh arrondissement, the kind of place that still works with phone calls and handwritten receipts. When the piece came back to me, raw, covered in casting residue, I sat with it for an entire afternoon before I dared to file anything. It looked like something pulled out of soil. A relic. A bone that had been buried and exhumed. I did not want to polish it the way commercial silver is polished. I wanted it to look like the wax had remembered itself in the metal.

That ring became the seed of the SKIN collection. Everything else followed from the lessons embedded in that first object. The decision to keep traces of the casting process. The decision to leave certain surfaces matte and others reflective. The decision to never sand a piece down to perfection. Anatomy is not perfect. Bones have ridges, scars, asymmetries. A ring that pretends otherwise is lying about its source.

The medical word

People often ask me where the name comes from. Dyskinesia is a clinical term. It describes involuntary, abnormal movement, the body doing something the mind did not ask it to do. It can appear as a side effect of certain medications, in neurological conditions, or sometimes idiopathically. I learned the word reading something unrelated, probably an essay, and it stayed with me for months before I understood why.

The word fits the project for two reasons. First, because the pieces I make are responses to the body in a non functional way. They are not utility objects. They are responses, sometimes contradictions, to the geometry of a finger, a wrist, an ear. They are involuntary in the sense that they did not arrive through commercial logic. They arrived because the body kept suggesting them. Second, because the word itself sounds like the work looks. It has weight. It has a clinical edge. It does not soften itself for the listener. I added a doubled final A to make it slightly off, slightly displaced. Dyskinesiaa, with two A. The repetition is the involuntary movement made typographical.

I considered other names. Most were too pretty, or too referential to existing brands, or too easy to translate. I wanted a word that resisted translation. A word that made you stop for a second before you tried to pronounce it. The first time someone read the brand name out loud to me at a fitting, they stumbled. I knew then it was the right word.

What I want from this project

The atelier is at 29 bis Rue Jean Jacques Rousseau, Studio Kremlin, in Ivry sur Seine, just outside the Paris périphérique. It is small. There is a wax bench, a casting station, a polishing wheel I bought second hand, a desk where I do the 3D modeling, and a wall where I pin reference plates. Antonio Salvatore on the cover of Vogue. A page from Vesalius. A clipping of A$AP Rocky wearing one of the rings on the cover of DON'T BE DUMB. A photograph of Stormy on the Rolling Stone MENA cover. The wall is the project's nervous system. Whenever I lose direction I look at it and remember what the work is supposed to do in the world.

What I want from DYSKINESIAA, more than anything, is for the pieces to feel inevitable when you wear them. Not decorative. Not optional. I want someone to put on a ring and feel that the finger had been waiting for that exact mass, that exact texture, that exact weight. This is why everything is made to order. Two to four weeks, no inventory, each piece cast specifically for the person who ordered it. No warehouse. No overproduction. The piece does not exist until someone has decided they want it. Then it is born, in wax, in metal, in the studio, and stamped inside with the signature.

I am not interested in scale for the sake of scale. I am interested in keeping the work close to the hand that makes it. As long as I can sign each piece, hold each piece, finish each piece myself or with a small number of trusted people, the project remains honest. The moment that becomes impossible, the project becomes something else. I am not in a hurry to find that out.

The made to order model is part of how I protect that. When someone places an order, I do not pull a finished piece off a shelf. There is no shelf. The wax is carved or pulled from the model library, the casting is scheduled, the finishing is done in the order it comes in, and then the piece travels in FSC certified packaging to the person who asked for it. Two to four weeks. No inventory sitting in a warehouse waiting for the right person. The piece exists because the person exists. This rhythm is slower than the industry expects, and I have lost orders to that slowness, but I have never lost an order from someone who understood what the slowness was buying them.

The materials are the second protection. Solid 925 sterling silver, real shed snakeskin in transparent resin, vegetable tanned leather, no plating, no shortcuts in the alloy. The more honest the materials are, the harder it becomes to compromise the work. A plated piece can be hidden inside marketing language. A solid silver piece, signed inside, cast individually, cannot be. It is what it says it is, all the way through. This is also why each piece is stamped on an interior surface that touches the wearer rather than the world. The signature is not for display. It is for the wearer to know, every time they put the piece on, where it came from.

The collaborations have been a slow, careful thing. I do not chase placements. The pieces have moved into the world by being worn by people who understood them on first contact. A$AP Rocky on the cover of DON'T BE DUMB. Stormy on the Rolling Stone MENA cover. Antonio Salvatore in Vogue. Genezio in Views France. Cristobal Pescer on a world tour. Lessss DJ in collaboration with Zero. Each of these moments happened because someone reached out, asked to see the work, picked a piece, and wore it. There has been no advertising spend. There has been no press push. The work has built its own audience by sitting on bodies that already had something to say.

If you are reading this, you are most likely deciding whether to enter that small audience yourself. I will not try to convince you. The pieces are either right for you or they are not, and the only way to find out is to see them, hold them if you can, and listen to what your body says when you put one on. If your body recognizes the metal, you will know. If it does not, you should keep looking, because there is no shortage of jewelry in the world and the pieces I make are not for everyone.

What I want from this project, finally, is for it to remain mine. Not in a possessive sense. In a structural sense. As long as the work comes out of the bench at 29 bis Rue Jean Jacques Rousseau, signed by my hand, cast in the order it was requested, the project is doing what it was meant to do. Everything else is secondary.

If you have read this far, you probably already understand what kind of project this is. It is not a brand in the marketing sense. It is a personal design project, a way of organizing the things I am thinking about into objects that other people can carry. If you want to see what those objects look like, the full catalogue is at /collections/all-pieces. Each piece tells a smaller version of this same story.