In collaboration with my father, I created some boites à musique, objects similar to the fantastic architecture of an eighteenth-century miniature garden, inlaid with precious woods and metals, which contain situations, dreams, characters who move to the sound of the carillon. Art and nature merge in enigmatic human figures and bizarre animals born from the assembly of the most unusual materials, in the Renaissance and seventeenth-century tradition of the encyclopaedic collections and Nordic Wunderkammern. They are creations which, even in the era of virtual reality, unleash the magical and archaic charm of the Automatons.

I created  some basilisks  (it would be better to say I 'captured basilisks'), above all for myself, for my personal Wunderkammer, finding it sad that Occam's razor of modern science has expunged dragons, unicorns, mermaids and basilisks from the decency of zoological collecting. These little domestic homunculi are fetishes, in the double sense of the ambiguous etymology, and reveal, with microscopic but peremptory authority, the inestimable magic of the object on the frontier between natural and artificial. Ambiguity of the fetish: for some from Fatum, Fari, Fanum, enchanted, enchanted thing. For others from facticious, artificial, fictitious.
What is a basilisk and how did this passion of mine come about? I tell Philippe Daverio about it in an interview for Passepartout.