Photos : Eddy Brière

Wool coil storage system : Gesture

 

 

Floor-to-ceiling windows punctuate the studio’s two main walls, each framed in a  different vivid colour that recalls the refraction of light through a prism. More than  mere openings onto the city, they become mediating devices through which the  urban landscape filters into the studio, spreading as a continuous flow of lines,  light, and movement. Within this meshwork of trajectories, the city is constantly  dispersed and reconfigured, as the space itself seamlessly merges into the urban flux.  

This dialogue shapes a porous, living environment, where artistic collaboration and  daily life unfold among heterogeneous elements, intertwined within the same fabric. 

​

Recalling a sequence of film stills, the succession of chromatic frames translates  the cityscape across different media. Urban fragments migrate into Kenia’s loom,  where cold neon lights and the carcasses of once-fast, flamboyant vehicles are  interlaced with thread, lending a cinematic dynamism to the textile assemblages.  Glowing resonances pierce the dense surfaces of her wall poems, their materiality  resting lightly between the lines. The seductive aesthetic of the periphery and its  mechanical yet pulsating rhythm unfold through Elliott’s intense, hypnotic  montage. In his visual appropriation, the metropolis is distilled into a network of  circuits, branching into endless loops. The same thread runs through the playful  cartography of the nylon play mats wrapping the small screening room, where  repetitive patterns mirror the city from above. 

​

Between the coloured windows, vertical rows of thread spools are carefully  arranged on wooden supports, in a systematic, almost industrial sequence that  organises our gaze. The city becomes a horizontal weft, its restless drift  condensing into a reticular logic. Echoing the chromatic rhythm of the window  frames, the warp threads, with their glossy, electric colours, turn into architectural  elements that interlace with the urban backdrop. This column-like arrangement  seems to evoke Gottfried Semper’s vision, articulated in Der Stil (1860–1863), of  weaving as a structural gesture that precedes its decorative function. Far from  being simply a geometric pattern, the grid is first and foremost a structural  framework, a foundational way of organising space through the intersection of  lines. This principle continues to shape the aesthetics of cities and their complex  flows, while finding a shared expression in the practices of Elliott Causse and  Kenia Almaraz Murillo. 

​

Alice Montanini