In Querelle, Floryan Varennes summons up gestures of preservation diverted from their initial use, and places them on the brink of rupture. Double glass arrows, sharpened at both ends, rest on surgical retractors: objects designed to open, hold and repair, but here transformed into supports for symbolic weaponry. It's not so much a question of aiming as of designating - a danger, a flaw, a memory.
Appropriating the military tradition of displaying the weapons of the vanquished, the artist composes a device of suspended trophies, where vulnerability seems to precede attack. The body is absent, but suggested by hollows - too fragile to appear, or already shattered. The mirrored arrow no longer merely threatens the other: it circles around oneself, like an intrusive thought, a desire to fall, an inner war. This tension between care and coercion also echoes the thinking of Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, for whom care is never neutral, but always situated, affected by power relations, shared vulnerabilities and differentiated responsibilities. The work thus becomes a place of friction between attention and control, where the gesture of care, instead of soothing, reveals the profound asymmetries that organize our existences.
Querelle thus draws a blurred line between self-care and the instinct to destroy, in an auto-immune tension where the act of protecting oneself also contains the act of reaching out to oneself. The work doesn't show a body, it summons its memory: that of a mute, sharpened battle, and of a disarmament still in abeyance. The title Querelle embodies this subtle tension, a silent inner struggle. It evokes an invisible conflict, where objects of care and protection are transformed into symbols of suspended fragility. Rather than an attack, it's a confrontation with oneself, where the gesture of defending oneself can also contain the gesture of altering oneself, in a fragile balance between persistance and rupture.
In Querelle, Floryan Varennes summons up gestures of preservation diverted from their initial use, and places them on the brink of rupture. Double glass arrows, sharpened at both ends, rest on surgical retractors: objects designed to open, hold and repair, but here transformed into supports for symbolic weaponry. It's not so much a question of aiming as of designating - a danger, a flaw, a memory.
Appropriating the military tradition of displaying the weapons of the vanquished, the artist composes a device of suspended trophies, where vulnerability seems to precede attack. The body is absent, but suggested by hollows - too fragile to appear, or already shattered. The mirrored arrow no longer merely threatens the other: it circles around oneself, like an intrusive thought, a desire to fall, an inner war. This tension between care and coercion also echoes the thinking of Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, for whom care is never neutral, but always situated, affected by power relations, shared vulnerabilities and differentiated responsibilities. The work thus becomes a place of friction between attention and control, where the gesture of care, instead of soothing, reveals the profound asymmetries that organize our existences.
Querelle thus draws a blurred line between self-care and the instinct to destroy, in an auto-immune tension where the act of protecting oneself also contains the act of reaching out to oneself. The work doesn't show a body, it summons its memory: that of a mute, sharpened battle, and of a disarmament still in abeyance. The title Querelle embodies this subtle tension, a silent inner struggle. It evokes an invisible conflict, where objects of care and protection are transformed into symbols of suspended fragility. Rather than an attack, it's a confrontation with oneself, where the gesture of defending oneself can also contain the gesture of altering oneself, in a fragile balance between persistance and rupture.
