Above, Below, Between

A proposal and a text by Oriane Emery & Jean-Rodolphe

Above, Below, Between is structured around the sphere as a relational environment. An intimate, invisible space that we construct daily in response to what surrounds us. The sphere is not understood here as a stable refuge, but as a milieu traversed by narratives, images, objects, and norms that orient us as much as we attempt to orient ourselves within them.

This approach is grounded in the thinking of Sara Ahmed (Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others), for whom orientation does not refer simply to movement through space, but to the ways bodies react to and metabolize the situations they encounter in their everyday environments. Ahmed’s work invites us to contextualize the question of orientation through an intersectional lens. To be oriented is to know what we turn toward : what attracts us, what reassures us, what puts us under tension, or what generates fear. The spaces we inhabit, particularly domestic space, organize what is within reach, what becomes familiar, and what remains out of view. To inhabit a space is never neutral: it means participating in existing patterns, reproducing certain power dynamics, but also potentially losing them, resisting them, or unlearning them. The works presented in the exhibition can be read as processes of metabolizing this intimate environment, attempts to render visible the forces that structure it and the reactions they provoke.

Some artistic practices are rooted in autobiographical narrative and fiction. They mobilize image, body, and language to make situated experiences perceptible, experiences shaped by identity, gender, memory, or forms of everyday violence. Other works operate through the displacement of ordinary objects: functional, domestic, or industrial forms are removed from their contexts of use in order to expose the economic, social, and ideological structures they carry. Between these two poles, several works occupy an intermediate position, combining narration, sign, and object, and reinforcing the overall permeability of the exhibition.

No work represents the home as such, nor celebrates it. Yet the domestic sphere remains omnipresent as a symbolic structure under scrutiny. The apartment appears here as a space of both orientation and disorientation. A site where dominant models are replayed and unsettled: patriarchal, capitalist, and colonial frameworks for which the home has often served as a primary vehicle of representation. Rather than speaking directly about “home,” the works traverse and fracture the idea of the household as a sanctuary. Instead, it emerges as a field of negotiation, where different orientations coexist, contradict one another, and overlap. This reading also resonates with the notion of homeplace developed by bell hooks (Homeplace, a Site of Resistance), which understands domestic space as both a site of vulnerability and a potential space of resistance, care, and reinvention.

Above, Below, Between ultimately opens a space in which other ways of inhabiting, situating oneself, and orienting oneself in the world become perceptible.

CALM – Centre d’Art La Meute thanks its main partner, UA26, for the invitation and trust.

We warmly thank the practitioners and the entities representing their works, including Galeria Filomena Soares in Lisbon, Dawid Radziszewski Gallery in Warsaw and Season 4 Episode 6 in London.

CALM – Centre d’Art La Meute gratefully aknowledges the Bundesministerium Wohnen, Kunst, Kultur, Medien und Sport of Austria, and Ville de Lausanne for their generous support to the project.

The visual identity was conceived by Mat* Avogadro.