Au seuil du corps sensible

In an examination of what lies beneath the skin and the forces acting upon it, four artists offer embodied considerations on the corporeal effects of overconsumption, the political realities of labour, and our collective, depleting reverence for craftsmanship and the agency of materials. Their work weaves through the machinations and myths that obscure a fundamental human longing for land, earth, and relational repair. Together, Amaralina Ramalho Alvarez, Lucy Gill, Mylene Raiche, and Anne-Sophie Vallée present a methodology of tactical inquiry. They reveal that the body is not a container designed to keep us out of the world, but a porous vessel deeply entangled with our external reality.

– Excerpt from curatorial text, by Jega Delisca

In an examination of what lies beneath the skin and the forces acting upon it, four artists offer embodied considerations on the corporeal effects of overconsumption, the political realities of labour, and our collective, depleting reverence for craftsmanship and the agency of materials. Their work weaves through the machinations and myths that
obscure a fundamental human longing for land, earth, and relational repair.

A rekindling with materiality is offered through Anne-Sophie Vallée’s visual recordings of wayward meetings between the biotic and the abiotic. In channeling the instinctive base of human curiosity, viewers are given a vantage point into the underpinnings of tactile sensation through cast, teased, and engulfed objects. Vallée’s configurations of synthetic materials and unstable plant matter bear a resemblance to natural phenomenons. Creatures washed ashore and fossilised remains leading the viewer on a search for signs of life, fostering primal considerations on the macro-micro interrelationship with our environment.

This meditation on sensation and life continues in Lucy Gill’s work, through a trifecta of fruit peels, pulp and fruit leather. These works tenders a conversation of death, which is softened by the possibility of regeneration. Depicted through post mortem visual motifs—a body draped in fruit leather, a curtain of honeyed lit spirals, and videoed skin revealing ruptures—death is sweetened into something more open and permeable, rather than sealed or final. This nutrient-filled decomposition suggests a journey of « decaying nourishment », a vital point in the cycle of preservation and perishability.

Mylene Raiche reimagines the earth itself as a body. By aligning her work with the earth’s longevity, she offers a meditation on stillness through woven landscapes of fiber draped across rocks, materials that will inevitably outlast the viewer. Through a repertoire of dualities such as soft/hard, concave/convex, Raiche translates the language of fluidity into rigged forms full of gesture recontextualizing visual language typically reserved for daunting borders, she depicts the earth not as a site of barriers, but as a body of hospitality.

Amaralina Ramalho Alvarez engages in somatic acts of remembering, in artisanal transformations—embroidery, carving, and mosaic assembly. Through these gestures of mending, Amaralina forms a ritual of honouring withered and exhausted bodies
in recovery from the stresses of displacement. Drawing inspiration from the historical and epidemiological
forces that compromised the self determination of a people and a land. Ramalho Alvarez tinkers around
colonial logics that continue to fester in the agricultural landscape of the Caribbean and Central America.

Ramalho Alvarez attentively asks how does the displaced carry fatigue?

Together, these artists present a methodology of tactile inquiry. They reveal that the body is not a container designed to keep us out of the world, but a porous vessel deeply entangled with our external
reality.

Images by Jean-Michael Seminaro