Untitled (2024)
In collaboration with visual artist Enrica Casentini
Site-specific installation: metal, rope, dust, paper
Untitled (2024) is an in-situ intervention at Espace Féria that stages a material feedback loop between the architecture and its own entropy. It begins with the idea of synthetic bathroom tiling, a lazy industrial mimesis where a single “organic” pattern repeats in an unapologetic display of artifice. Against this backdrop, the work constructs a simulacrum of domestic utility, flattening 'nature' into a texture pack.
Along the perimeter, this logic folds in on itself. The surrounding 'tiles' are revealed as paper prints reproducing the ceiling’s flocked surface, pushing the space into a recursive architectural tautology. The industrial substrate is elevated to decoration, inverting a function that was already compromised to begin with. The corner becomes a meta-kitsch hinge, where surface pretends to be structure, and structure pretends to be surface, each cancelling the other’s authority. The tiles operate as a double-edged device: they extend the mimetic chain of simulacra, echoing the fake organic kitsch tile pattern, while simultaneously cannibalizing their own referent, since the source material is the ceiling itself. The room ends up mimicking itself, folding its industrial substrate back into ornamental repetition until surface and structure collapse into equivalence.
Within this unstable loop, the shower functions as an arrested utility. It negates its own nature: nothing flows, nothing cleans; it hangs suspended in time and effectiveness. The threads sag with dust, refusing the functional promise of a shower and instead amplifying the room’s internal leakage with the ceiling draining back into the architecture through the floor.