# Project Description In Memoriam of Cassandre Vesper Sky Willimont Summary Final work Sky Willimont (b. 1999) is a French-British artist. Their artistic practice is, first and foremost, one of writing, a duality of language, both French and English, wielded as malleable tools in their inherent variations, discordances, harmonies, and the multiplicity of modalities, genres, and cadences they suggest. Writing emerges as an impulse, a reaction, raw expression navigating between thought and emotion, memory and creation, flowing through the meanderings of consciousness, from ink traced on paper to take note. A trace: intangible, immanent, poised at the collision of fiction and reality, a tense, expressed boundary, a terra incognita , a horizon of expectation. Narrative, as if in departure, in superimposition. Then comes the act of giving shape through video, sound, and scenography. Spaces are inhabited by reflections, actors, alter egos, sketched by the introspective persistence of a semblance of auto-ethnography. A translation. A reinvestment. A process of excavating the self, of forensic archaeology, reassembling a narrative that reclaims the blind spots of fiction. In their practice, as in their academic background in literature, they explore fiction as method, an unveiling, an approach, a conceptual lens for inhabiting the world as plural becoming. Their research spans autofiction and its shifting ambiguity, parafiction and its proximity to myth, fiction in all its forms, rooted in a world oversaturated with storytelling, where belief often prevails over fact. History and ethnography, too, are understood here as narrative forms: fragmentary, subjective, intimate, and collective. At the heart of the work lies a study of thresholds, gray areas where reality and fiction, memory and mysticism, desire and rejection, truth and faith bleed into one another. These no man’s lands sketch the fragility of the narratives we inhabit, wavering halfway, like living stilts through time borne of the need to make sense. Fiction, for them, is an attempt to traverse, to connect, where the personal meets the universal, where narrative becomes both a reflection of reality and its subversion, its reinterpretation, its re-enchantment. An ineffable certainty persists: that beyond all else, something still remains to be grasped. Sky Willimont (b. 1999) is a French-British artist. Their artistic practice is, ... College Central Saint Martins Course BA (Hons) Fine Art Graduation year 2025 In Memoriam of Cassandre Vesper : @TiaLambsHeart, don’t follow my priv keep the illusion that it’s all real xx This project is a parafictional shrine-installation centred on the fictional disappearance of Cassandre Vesper, a fictional character whose digital traces, scattered across a blog, a fan-constructed website, a Google Doc and a novella, have been obsessively archived and mythologised by an anonymous online community. The installation itself is composed of soft and devotional materials : crocheted wool strings, ribbons, glow-in-the-dark stars, photographs, a plushie lamb, trinkets, pearls, and a low table draped in pink satin and white lace. At its centre sits a vintage 2007 desktop MacBook, the access point to the story-world, its screen displaying a speculative fan site investigating Cassandre’s disappearance. These narrative elements, digital, sculptural, textual, performative, branch outward from the shrine like a constellation, forming a system of parafictional threads that the viewer must navigate. This artwork proposes a study in fragmentation, a deliberately orchestrated scattering of signs, all circling an absent centre: the disappearance of Cassandre Vesper. Her vanishing acts as both narrative fulcrum and conceptual anchor. Each relic stages a different mode of engagement and belief. Together, they form a parafictional web, where every element contradicts, echoes, or reframes another. A polyphonia of intertextuality. Meaning arises not from resolution but from navigation, an arborescent structure of cross-references, inconsistencies, and unstable timelines that demands interpretive labour. Like a conspiracy map, it invites obsessive reading and yet defers closure. This intermedial scattering is not suppletive; it is the very architecture of the work’s inquiry. Each format enacts a cognitive mode familiar to online users: reading, scrolling, watching, speculating. The viewer becomes participant, not simply consuming a narrative, but helping to build it. Belief flickers, elusive, resisting resolution, forever remaining out of reach, a horizon of expectative where two contradictory statements can be true at once. What parafiction enables here is not simply storytelling, but a staging of emotional and cultural rituals around loss. Through Cassandre’s disappearance, the work explores what it means to grieve something, or someone, that was never there. And yet, the grief feels real. Cassandre becomes an affective construct built from fragments, memories, and digital artefacts. She is a fiction, but also a vessel for real emotion, a mirror reflecting our own investments in narratives of loss. In fine what the artwork reveals is not just how fiction masquerades as truth, but how truth itself is curated, performed, and consumed. It is not simply Cassandre who disappears, but the boundary between fact and fiction. The final gesture, a corrupted image, a glitch, or a stylised trace, does not close the narrative. It lingers. Not as an ending, but as remnant. A presence shaped by absence. A fiction sustained by belief. Cassandre’s disappearance is not a metaphor for a specific figure, but a meditation on the ways disappearance itself circulates, as media, as myth, as collective obsession. Rather than reenacting the missing girl trope, the project asks the audience to read between the lines, divulging a complexity in the narrative, a depth. There are no monsters, no incarnations; the culprits are multiple and echo the difficulties of growing up queer in the 2010s, internalised and societal homophobia, the elusiveness of interpersonal relationships, a feeling of loss and perdition, the resonance of religious symbolism, the escapism of the internet turned into a panopticon where every move is scrutinised and laden with hidden meaning. Melancholia is at the heart of this project. Estrangement, its mode. It is not a coming-of-age narrative, but its subversion, its inversion, the reification of a figure always on the flee, conjured like an image of innocence, constrained to live on as memory, as an empty shell inhabiting the hollowness of arrested development: forever in a motion of drowning, suspended, weightless, in a sea of formalin. Final work In Memoriam of Cassandre Vesper Mixed media installation, This devotional assemblage forms the physical and emotional centre of a parafictional narrative surrounding the fictional disappearance of Cassandre Vesper. Constructed from soft, symbolic materials, crocheted wool strings, glow-in-the-dark stars, trinkets, ribbons, pearls, photographs, and a plushie lamb, the shrine evokes both teenage bedrooms and digital memorials. A vintage 2007 desktop MacBook sits at its core, displaying a speculative fan website dedicated to the case of Cassandre, serving as the primary access point to a broader cross-media narrative including a blog and a novella. Referencing conspiracy boards, fan culture, and improvised acts of mourning, the shrine blurs the line between fiction and memory. Each element is carefully selected to suggest both innocence and obsession, the pink satin, the white lace, the ephemeral glow of plastic stars, offering a material counterpart to the digital fragments that compose Cassandre’s myth. As the viewer stands before it, they are invited not only to observe, but to enter a narrative space shaped by intimacy, speculation, and unresolved grief. In Memoriam of Cassandre Vesper (details) @TiaLambsHeart, don’t follow my priv keep the illusion that it’s all real xx The website serves as the narrative and affective core of the parafictional world surrounding Cassandre Vesper’s disappearance. Designed in the aesthetic of an early 2000s fan site—soft pastels, glittering gifs, pixel fonts—it gathers and curates scattered digital traces: screenshots, speculative commentary, character profiles, and a shared Google Doc. Framed as the work of an anonymous admirer obsessed with the case, the site acts as both shrine and investigation board, linking the project’s disparate media, the blog, the novella, into a dense, hypertextual constellation. It is the primary point of access into the fictional universe, inviting the viewer to read, doubt, and assemble meaning through immersion and emotional projection. The occurrence of Melancholia : Cherry candy higher than the surex sky (excerpt) Cherry candy higher than the surex sky is a chapter extracted from The Occurrence of Melancholia , the unfinished autofictional novel serialized on Cassandre Vesper’s personal blog between 2009 and her disappearance in 2011. Written in a lush, recursive prose, the novella stages a fevered, atmospheric exploration of queer desire, grief, and dissociation. Fragmented and dreamlike, it functions as both an intimate confession and a premonition, interweaving coming-of-age with an impending loss that never quite resolves. Set between digital intimacy and emotional rupture, the text mirrors the broader parafictional system of the project, both foreshadowing and refracting the myth of Cassandre’s drowning. Research and process Effects of reality Narrative Foundations Share this project In Memoriam of Cassandre Vesper : @TiaLambsHeart, don’t follow my priv keep the illusion that it’s all real xxThis project is a parafictional shrine-installation centred on the fictional disappearance of Cassandre Vesper, a fictional character whose dig... A link to this page has been added to your clipboard Browse related work Digital Experiences Gender Play Privacy Realities Sexuality Identity Story & Myth Mental Health Aesthetics Language Being Human Fiction LGBTQ+ Nostalgia Internet Narrative Digital Immersive Reality Surrealism Loss MentalHealth