Derrière la luette

Anastasia Simonin and Kazuo Yagi Marsden make sculptures and installations out of wood that they associate with other materials like tin, alabaster or soapstone. Their work is based on contact zones that join the body to what surrounds it. Through variations in scale, their work involves surfaces capable of filtering, retaining or letting pass. From the bottom of the sink to the inside of the body, from pipes to organs, the duo’s exhibition replays mechanisms of drainage and sanitation, revealing what flows through us as much as what we reject. The work displaces familiar situations and recompose them into ambiguous ensembles, where materials meet and disrupt their identification. Derrière la luette articulates banal and immediately recognisable shapes. Sink filter, cotton bud, uvula or kidney become passing figures, linked to gestures of sorting and disposal. Displaced or recomposed, they transform into interfaces where exchanges take place between interior and exterior, suggesting conduits whose function we ignore. The sink filter constitutes one of these turning points. Last hurdle before the sewers, it collects an indistinct mix of matter which agglomerate in a proximity that is both familiar and repulsive. We reach in without really looking, in a gesture that is both mechanical and hesitant, as if at the threshold of a space we prefer not to know. This gesture is repeated, almost mechanically, inscribing these accumulations in a cycle whose extensions we rarely perceive. Beyond that, everything disappears into an underground network of which we only have an abstract perception, a space we never see but to which we remain connected. The artists give form to a zone of vagueness, a place of passage between what still belongs to us and what is already slipping away. This relation to filtering continues through the presence of the kidney, considered as an internal water treatment plant. The sorting organ operates a continuous selection process, retaining some substances while others are rejected. It is also a place of accumulation, where elements that the body cannot assimilate are deposited. Cadmium, from contaminated soil and present in food, can thus accumulate there without being eliminated, leaving direct traces of its environment in the body. Other deposits can, under certain conditions, concentrate to the point of forming concretions. The body then appears as a sedimentation site capable of producing its own mineral matter, even generating elements that become foreign to it. The cotton bud, a commonplace object destined for disposal, introduces a more intimate relationship. It evokes gestures of care and that ambiguous sensation, both pleasant and slightly unsettling, linked to contact with an area whose interior remains unknown. Enlarged to the scale of the body and placed on a bath towel, it acquires an unexpected presence: in the cotton, two faces with closed eyes, whose situation remains uncertain. A sense of strangeness then arises to the idea that they might approach the inside of our ears. Nearby, hanging forms resemble a series of uvulas, as if the wall were naturally endowed with them. Aligned side by side, they compose a strange, silent choir. Located at the entrance to the throat, uvulas regulate the passage of air and food: they filter, block, or allow certain streams to circulate. Here, they seem to extend the ventilation of the art centre itself. The artworks thus shift our attention to ordinary mechanisms of filtration, circulation, or evacuation to which we rarely pay attention. The forms they unfold reveal zones of passage and exchanges that are usually invisible. Between humor, mild disgust, and fascination, they give a new presence to what silently flows through the body and spaces. Behind the obviousness of everyday life, something persists and continues to operate.