ADÈLE SWEETLOVE
                                           
 Adèle Sweetlove (b. 2000, Belgium) is a visual artist  based in Brussels. Her work is site responsive, shaped by the rhythms, and histories of place. 

Since 2025, Adèle has been a member of Kassé Collective, a group of artists and designers. The collective was given the opportunity to transform a Brussels townhouse into a centre of creativity and complete freedom. With this building, Kassé Collective provides artists and creatives with a space to showcase their work and contribute to sustaining Brussels’ cultural sector.


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Works





This Username Is Already In Use (2025)

videoinstallation, steel, stained glass
220 x 48 x 220 cm
9’25’’















There is something radical in the work of Adèle Sweetlove, something that resonates with well-known avant-garde traditions, yet takes shape through the most contemporary lens. For the work ‘This Username Is Already In Use’ (2025), she downloaded all available data that applications had stored about her -a right enshrined in the GDPR legislation of 2018. Using this digital self-portrait as a souce, she asked AI sources to create a character. The resulting identity is fragmented and layered, intimate, at times generic.

In a video, an artificial voice describes the generated personality, while Sweetlove plays an unspoken game against herself. She switches roles, as both protagonist and antagonist, at a kind of checkboard, where she slides pieces of glass across a larger stained-glass window in light-and dark green. The act is one of introspection: she analyzes her own steps, choices, and doubts.

The setting is her grandfather’s studio, where he taught her the stained-glass technique. In this way, a dialogue arises between craftsmanship and artificial intelligence, between family history and digital projection.

‘This Username Is Already In Use’ (2025) also includes a stained-glass construction, a stage that cannot be stepped on, embodying the fragility of thought and the delicate nature of online presence. At the same time, Sweetlove raises questions that go beyond the character she (and AI) created. What is the impact of the often euphoric language used by chatbots? What does it mean that digital personalities can, in theory, exist forever, detached from the bodies that generated them? The stage seems set for this “state of constant visibility in which we ourselves also actively participate.”


— text written by art historian Sander Bortier for Metropolis M issue n° 04 (aug - sep 2025)