Mise en demeure depicts generic spaces that appear to have been evacuated of all human presence. Persisting in residual form, the bodies that emerge from the margins of the frame are reduced to the shadows of those who created and inhabited these environments. Urban infrastructures, dysfunctional furniture, silent signage, artificial nature: the works presented here tell the story of a world designed by individuals who have set in motion the conditions of their own disappearance. Referring to the legal procedure that precedes a possible seizure, the exhibition’s title evokes a form of forced expropriation, a formal notice issued by capitalist mechanisms that standardize our ways of life and gradually erase all forms of individuality.

An unoccupied holiday residence, a place of transit or consumption, the house in which the exhibition is situated likewise evokes environments that remain impersonal despite their domestic character. Like a show apartment, the villa conveys the notion of a set, a temporary dwelling in which short-term occupants are encouraged to leave no trace of their presence. In opposition to the idea of home or hospitality, this liminal space—suspended between use and abandonment—sketches the contours of a world in which evidence of existence is gradually absorbed by a logic of circulation and profitability.

In The Generic City, architect Rem Koolhaas describes this standardization of spaces as the consequence of a broader dynamic that produces homogeneous forms of behavior. The production of predictable, controllable, and reproducible environments lies at the heart of a liberal system that privileges ergonomics and efficiency at the expense of identity. The spaces in which we move become interchangeable, homogeneous, and subject to norms dictated by flows and consumption. This post-city thus echoes a systemic mechanism, a “place of weak and diffuse sensations, of rare and widely spaced emotions (1).” The casinos, duty-free shops, and falsely opulent postmodern architectures that populate the exhibition evoke so many markers of a commodified society. In this disordered universe, flowers are transformed into seductive facsimiles, ornament and display replace everyday objects, and surveillance cameras seem almost alluring. These endlessly replicated motifs resonate with the thinking of philosopher Sianne Ngai, who suggests that “the gimmick is latent in everything made under capitalism (2).”

The exhibition thus examines the ways in which the economic systems that govern us produce forms of erasure. While industrial capitalism directly exploits bodies, its contemporary tendencies increasingly render them invisible. Behind the fluidity of exchanges, logistical flows, and rental or service platforms, human presences dissolve in favor of interchangeable and continuously available spaces. The home becomes a set, dwelling becomes a product, and lived experiences are transformed into consumable content.

Extending the questions initiated in Tout doit disparaître (Everything Must Go), the exhibition considers disappearance as an insidious process resulting from an enterprise of homogenization that shapes individuals and their ways of existing. It explores strategies of diminishing the body, its progressive distancing, and its invisibilization within environments where everything seems to persist except those who inhabit them.

Camille Velluet

(1) Rem Koolhaas, « The Generic City », in S, M, L, XL, New York, The Monacelli Press, 1995, p. 1239-1280.
(2) Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form, 2020, p. 47.