Crossings
Science and Arts
The lab's work sits at the intersection of craniofacial research, the PRIM3D platform, and the maxillofacial surgery department of Necker - Enfants malades Hospital, and regularly extends into collaborations with artists, designers, and philosophers from the École des Arts Décoratifs-PSL and ENS-PSL, under Institut Imagine's "Vulnérabilités et Capabilités" (VULCA) chair.
Ongoing
Current projects
FaceWorld
The face and body in craniofacial malformations — led by Roman Hossein Khonsari, with Charlotte Jacquemot (CNRS, ENS-PSL), Bérangère Rousselot-Pailley (Université Paris Cité), the association Les P'tits Courageux, and Tetyana Pavlychuk (surgeon, Ohmatdyt Hospital, Kyiv).
How does a child perceive their own face when born with a craniofacial malformation? FaceWorld explores self-perception in children with rare cranial and facial malformations, combining medicine, art, and psychology — a comparative study run at Necker - Enfants malades Hospital (France) and Ohmatdyt Hospital (Kyiv, Ukraine), where children with facial malformations now live alongside people injured in the war.
The project uses RRose, a digital self-portrait tool built by artist Laurent Saksik: from a photo, the interface turns the image into a set of lines that the child can move, alter, emphasize, or reinvent, to reclaim their own image.
Self-portraits by the ten children who took part are shown in the exhibitionDu soin au dessin ("From care to drawing"), 15–17 June 2026 at Galerie 24B (24 bis rue Saint-Roch, 75001 Paris).
FaceWorld's Ukrainian side was also presented at An Invisible War: Civilian Destruction and Reconstruction in Silence, with Roman Hossein Khonsari — seeEvents.
Outs[AI]der
With Julie Tang, Parand Danesh, Anne-Marie Dubois, and Raphaël Gaillard (GHU Paris Psychiatrie et Neurosciences). Applying computational methods to the MAHHSA museum's (Musée d'Art et d'Histoire de l'Hôpital Sainte-Anne) outsider-art collection, compared against a corpus of modern and contemporary art (Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, MoMA), to explore whether these methods distinguish outsider art from a conventional corpus, reveal distinct formal characteristics, and whether those characteristics correlate with clinical parameters.
Archive
Past collaborations
La Torre dell’anima
A transmedia installation by Donatien Aubert, co-created with maxillofacial surgeon Roman Hossein Khonsari (Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital and Necker - Enfants malades Hospital), from anonymized CT scans of trauma patients (gunshot, road accident, defenestration, fall, cancer). 3D-printed by powder sintering, shown at Galerie YGREC in 2017 (the former radiology center of Hôpital Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, now Les Grands Voisins).
Nephrolithiasis
An anatomical sculpture by Dana-Fiona Armour, in which crystals grown in vitro colonize a block of marble — a metaphor for kidney stones. The work was micro-CT scanned at the Montrouge dental school and 3D-modeled with the participation of Necker - Enfants malades Hospital.
Bloc opératoire, regards croisés
Operating-room drawings at Necker - Enfants malades Hospital, by Christelle Téa, drawn in Chinese ink during her residency in the department (2016-2018).
Anticorps
Twelve sculptures by Olga Kisseleva exploring the similarities between computer and biological viruses, starting from a scan of a 17th-century sculpture. Set up by Prof. Roman Khonsari in spring 2020 in the Port-Royal cloister (Cochin Hospital), within the emergency 3D-printing workshop born during the Covid pandemic. Shown from 16 November to 19 December 2021 at Galerie Michel Journiac.
Tout s’est bien passé
A surgical-theatre play written by Prof. Roman Hossein Khonsari. First public reading on 17 June 2024 at the Académie Nationale de Chirurgie (Couvent des Cordeliers, Paris), staged by actors.