Who Adopts Whom ? is an artistic research project focused on international adoption that presents itself as a quest for love and justice, based on the experience of a transracial and transnational adoptee in the Global North.

My name is Lucile Saada Choquet, I was born in Djibouti to Ethiopian parents, and I live and work in Europe. In October 2022, I came out of an invisible condition, turning the shame of being black and adopted into a research subject. I decided to listen to my inner howl and investigate my anger at the dominant, romanticised narrative of international adoption.

During two years of research, I wrote about and documented the coloniality, illicit practices and abuses that underpin the international adoption system, in order to symbolically do justice to the experiences of adopted people. Who benefits from the international adoption system? In the service of what political project? I never stop questioning and analysing what makes it possible to reproduce capitalist violence. My aim is to use the memory of the body as archive(s) to represent what international adoption does to the bodies of racialised adoptees.

How can we use the performative arts to create non-hegemonic imaginaries? By writing about reality and the memory of a body that has been dispossessed, displaced and appropriated, how can we unfold a theatricality of chaos? I develop a dramaturgy that combines literary, scientific, activist, historical and personal approaches. By organising non-mixed encounters with adoptees, I contribute to the collective transmission of empirical knowledge and I feed my questions linked to making family and to the search for a diaspora made up of adoptees.

In 2024, I set out to move away from eurocentrism and open up my research to Ethiopia. By learning Amharic, Ethiopia's official language, I made an initial shift that enabled me to put an end to the asphyxia of whiteness that circulates within me. In 2025, I will continue the transformation of a colonised interior view by investigating the native land of my biological family, Ethiopia.

What are ethiopians' views on international adoption ? As a black european adoptee, is it possible to move towards a fundamentally decolonial and non-eurocentric artistic practice?