What is the hidden side of the places we inhabit?
What remains within their walls after we leave?
What spirits linger after our disappearance?

It is these presences that the exhibition Sentinelles seeks to probe, marking the second occurrence in Marseille of the spiaggia libera gallery in its new space. Inviting artists to speculate on the past and memory of this place, the exhibition becomes the fictional archive of the house perched on the heights of Malmousque. False memories and relics of former tenants blend with models that nestle in the gaps left by authentic furniture. Creatures hidden under the bed and spectral beings are called to leave their hiding places in an endeavor of spiritism and exorcism of the place, aiming to unearth – and sometimes exorcise – traces of past lives.

An altar to the sentinels welcomes us, a prelude to what awaits once the threshold is crossed. This is one of the multiple interventions by Youri Johnson within these walls. Potions and filters, magic cards, grimoires, and talismans of all kinds are objects that once belonged to a former resident, left there as an initiation to The Secret Art of the Secret War. Other specters inhabit the space. Louise Belin pays tribute to them in the series Augures, which represents immaterial phenomena, various appearances, most often unidentified. Another spectral figure – a fragmented body – is diffused in the monumental painting by Romana Londi, a tutelary presence overseeing the entire exhibition. A series of scrolls, relics of Michele Gabriele’s past life, recount events that occurred in the artist’s personal history, elevated to the status of fiction once they are committed to paper.

In contrast, Loucia Carlier’s world sculptures resemble dioramas that encapsulate a dystopian version of our societies. Part signage panels, part models showcasing universes that blend domestic and bureaucratic furniture within both a lunar and subterranean environment, her works are conceived as different spaces within space, and as intertwined stories. Anastasia Simonin & Kazuo Marsden, for their part, imagine totemic icons in the image of the impalpable flows that give life to the spaces. Bulbs, faucets, and electrical sockets are thus celebrated as aquatic and electrical fluids that pass through the walls of the house. Gaspar Willmann, on the other hand, blends generic and organic objects in his hyper-realistic paintings within compositions whose source is the digital image discovered through various web navigations.

The naiads of Marilou Poncin, who discreetly populate the space, reveal themselves to us through reflections. Suggesting intimate postures, they unfold in all the water rooms of the house, nymphs subtly slipping out of sight. In the same vein, Sol Cattino’s wooden paintings appear as a series of ex-votos depicting scenes inspired by his daily life in Marseille. Odes to the city, various figures enter the rooms of the house, much like penates, the deities responsible for the protection of the home. A video installation by Antoine Donzeaud reenacts an enclosed space within one of the upstairs rooms, enclosing a female portrait hidden in concentric blades that must be partially opened.

The title of the exhibition also carries a protective, if not belligerent, value. The pieces by Anna de Castro Barbosa each possess a seductive yet dangerous character, traps scattered in the interstices of the house. Like true sentinels, they unfold, sinuously, ready to ambush us. Silent warriors, they become the guardians of the place’s memory. Perched in the lookout, a final figure painted by Jack Warne observes everything, the last inhabitant of the walls watching over the others.

This territory, both domestic, intimate, and open to the outside – a house neither truly inhabited nor completely abandoned – thus opens a reflection on affective architecture, the way we inhabit spaces and are sometimes inhabited by them. Through this exhibition, the aim is to erase the past in order to define the new purpose of this space converted into a gallery, now ready to welcome new spirits.

– Camille Velluet