Jennetta Petch & Szymon Kula – La Maison en bois de lune, 2024

What unites Jennetta Petch and Szymon Kula is a shared relationship with materials and utility objects. Working as a duo, the two artists explore their history and uses, whether it involves raw materials such as leather or wood, or manufactured objects like ancient farm implements or contemporary sports equipment. For them, matter and objects talk: they speak of the gestures that shaped them, the bodies that used them and the context of the societies that produced them.

La Maison en bois de lune is inspired by an old Bresse custom which allowed anyone who built a house in one night on a piece of communal land to become the owner of it if the smoke from the chimney could be seen at sunrise. In this work, Jennetta Petch and Szymon Kula have been interested in anarchist or religious communities like the Shakers, a Puritan sect, who produced plain, functional furniture. The fireplace is the focal point of the installation and seems to be as much a potential workshop as a space for the family. A network of metal pipes fans out from it, on which large pieces of leather have been hung, as if to dry. These have been moulded onto sculptures of burnt wood, conceived as traditional tools. In the museum space, these gestures and objects seem to herald a future in which people will have to adapt to profound changes in the world.