Gaëlle Choisne's work seeks to forge relationships beyond preconceived notions of identity by confronting the systems of oppression that produce and sustain them. Through hybrid forms and layered narratives, her practice explores the possibility of collective healing. In Safe Spaces for a Passing History, she develops this inquiry through what she calls "scrap painting," a process in which techniques and iconographies drawn from both popular and scholarly traditions converge. Combining ceramics, pastel, painting, photographs, archival images, talismanic writing, and everyday objects across a range of supports, she reshapes the language of painting according to her own methods, foregrounding the embodied nature of the metaphysical and political questions that animate her work.

Beyond its material dimension, Safe Spaces for a Passing History opens onto a less tangible realm through the artist's mediumistic practice, rendering the boundary between the visible and the invisible permeable. These works function as energetic portals that rearrange quantum timelines, revealing new fields of possibility and proposing alternative ways of inhabiting the world.

Initially conceived to honor historical women of the Haitian Revolution, the series has since expanded to include a wide range of cultural and political figures, from Rihanna to the women warriors of Dahomey. In doing so, it addresses broader questions surrounding the absence—or distortion—of marginalized communities within collective memory and imagination. This body of work marks a pivotal moment in Choisne's practice, bringing together concerns that have long shaped her research. By weaving across historical periods, artistic techniques, popular and scholarly cultures, historical representation, and spiritual inquiry, Safe Spaces for a Passing History celebrates speculative narratives of artistic and political self-determination. It also pays tribute to the "chaordic," a concept coined by economist Dee Hock to describe the organic coexistence of order and chaos.

Within this threshold, Choisne creates spaces for reinvention—spaces that are "safe" because they invite viewers to imagine, alongside the artist, a world that might be collectively inhabited: an alternative to the violence of official histories and the structures that sustain them. The word "passing" is deliberately chosen for its ambiguity, referring both to disappearance and to the strategies of survival through which oppressed individuals have historically adopted the customs of dominant groups, particularly within the contexts of systemic racism and transgender experience. Functioning simultaneously as political toolkits and fields of intuitive experimentation, the paintings enact what decolonial philosopher Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has described as "rewriting its own conditions of impossibility as the conditions of its possibility" for marginalized subjects. In this way, Safe Spaces for a Passing History proposes a form of healing that links the personal and the political, bringing intimate histories into dialogue with collective liberation.