You got what you deserved

YOU GOT WHAT YOU DESERVED. Sorry, but it’s oh so stressful. Encountered like this, at the turn of a street, printed on a T-shirt left to dry. YOU GOT WHAT YOU DESERVED. This whiff of bad karma, fuelled by a mix of divine justice and social beliefs. Or would it be the other way around? All that’s missing is a dash of meritocracy to spice things up. So, deserved or not? That’s simply not the question. This T-shirt is part of a series of photographs entitled "Popular Problems". Captured in the most straightforward and ordinary of everyday settings, the photographs bring together subjects and situations whose juxtaposition suggests connections, analogies. Here, Lena Brudieux draws out four of them: the threatening T-shirt, a spider accompanied by its prolific offspring, a plastic bottle wedged between two bars on the metro, and a delicate mushroom standing magnificently erect in the undergrowth. Much like the spider’s work, a web takes shape here. A tiny one. You can make out the constraints imposed on the trapped bottle. The verticality of the bars and that of the mushroom. A domesticated environment versus nature’s adaptability. The beginnings of an assembly. Perhaps even the expression of guilt. A set of actions and consequences. Lena Brudieux continues this collection of everyday life with "Instructions". What a lovely litotes for addressing norms, control, authority. What one is supposed to do in any given context. Rules laid down anywhere, by anyone. Like IKEA instruction manuals, themselves extensions of the prescribed route through the chain’s stores. Like cat’s cradle patterns, binding fingers together. Like the perfect Swiss roll. Like the right vibration that must travel through a building. All presented against the administrative grey background of a document sorter repurposed as a frame. The frame, we tell you. What stress. All this pressure, all these constraints. Stress in the plural, because, as if one kind of happiness were not enough, there are several kinds of stress. Psychological, of course. But also its physical alter ego : mechanical stress, which refers to the forces exerted on a material and the effects they produce. As it happens, there is a science devoted to studying the deformation and flow of matter under stress: rheology. And looking at Lena Brudieux’s work, the laws of physics might offer a way in. Because, after all, what do we do when faced with injunctions? We bend to them. We circumvent them. We subvert them. We adapt to them. Sometimes, we break. For her practice does not merely compile a catalogue of authoritarianism in all its forms, whether exercised in public or private space. It also complements it with an equally varied repertoire of responses. The refusal of a social convention, an instruction that cannot apply to all forms of life, or an unexpected adaptation to a given context. Looking at photographs of cats whose bodies seem perfectly capable of conforming to all kinds of containers, a rheology scientist began to wonder: are cats liquid? The answer is not clear-cut. Basically, it all depends on how long you are willing to observe the feline’s gradual deformation. Given enough time, even materials we consider solid can deform. In Lena Brudieux’s work, the cat liquefies on an exercise bike, the Christmas tree melts - is global warming to blame?, the architectural plan moulds itself into something unidentifiable, the hare’s-foot inkcap will evolve through deliquescence until it dissolves into black ink, and the domesticated tortoise, we believe, will eventually make its escape. Because “if you wait long enough, everything flows”*. Unless everything collapses first. YOU GOT WHAT YOU DESERVED. September 2026 *Marc-Antoine Fardin, “Are Cats Liquid?”, TEDxTours.