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.

In contrast, Loucia Carlier’s world-sculptures resemble dioramas encapsulating a dystopian version of our societies. Part signage panels, part models presenting universes that blend domestic and bureaucratic furniture in environments that are both lunar and underground, her works are conceived as different spaces within a space, each telling a tangled story. Anastasia Simonin & Kazuo Marsden, for their part, imagine totemic icons representing the intangible flows that animate spaces. Light bulbs, faucets, and electrical outlets are celebrated as aquatic and electrical fluids flowing through the walls of the house. Gaspar Willmann, on the other hand, mixes generic and organic objects in his ultra-realistic paintings, creating compositions based on digital images discovered through various web browsing sessions

The naiads of Marilou Poncin, which discreetly inhabit the space, reveal themselves to us through reflections. Suggesting intimate postures, they unfold in every bathroom of the house, nymphs subtly eluding our gaze. In the same vein, the wood paintings of Sol Cattino present themselves as a series of ex-votos depicting scenes inspired by his daily life in Marseille.
Odes to the city, various figures are invited into the rooms of the house, much like the Penates, the deities responsible for guarding the home. A video installation by Antoine Donzeaud re-enacts a confined space within one of the upstairs rooms, enclosing a female portrait hidden within concentric blades that must be slightly opened.

The title of the exhibition also carries a protective, if not belligerent, connotation. The works of Anna de Castro Barbosa each embody a seductive yet dangerous quality, traps scattered within the interstices of the house. Like true sentinels, they unfurl, serpentine, ready to assail us. Silent warriors, they become the guardians of the memory of the place. Perched in the lookout, a final figure painted by Jack Warne observes the entire scene, the last inhabitant of the walls watching over the others.

This territory, both domestic and intimate, yet open to the outside—neither truly inhabited nor entirely abandoned—thus opens up 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 acknowledge the new purpose of this space, now converted into a gallery and ready to welcome new spirits.

– Camille Velluet