Based between London and Paris, Georgia grew up surrounded by magazines and fashion photography, developing an early sensitivity to the ways images, words, typography and composition can work together to construct a narrative. These influences continue to inform a practice that moves between fashion and documentary photography while increasingly embracing experimentation. More recently, darkroom printing and a fascination with language; double meanings, wordplay and tongue-in-cheek expressions, have become ways of expanding the image through material process, chance and text.

The conversation unfolds around Cold Feet, a collective exhibition curated by Christina Libri at Southern & Partners in Soho. Bringing together five photographers in their mid-twenties, the exhibition explores a shared moment of uncertainty, curiosity and vulnerability, with works moving between humour, pain and joy.

Within the exhibition, Georgia’s portraits explore the instinctive connection between subject and photographer. Her presence is never entirely absent: an arm or foot enters the frame, while elsewhere text or shadow becomes a trace of the person behind the camera.

For Georgia, cold feet captures the anticipation of finding your footing as a young artist: the nervousness of making, showing and putting something into the world, and trusting yourself enough to do it anyway.

Cold Feet is on view at Southern & Partners, 46 Lexington St, London, through July 31.

Closing event: Friday, July 31, 6–8pm.

@georgiajones

@christinalibri

En dialogue avec Solveig Wilson Carrier, elles reviennent sur son parcours entre La Réunion, Paris et New York, les expériences qui ont construit sa vision de la photographie, ainsi que la naissance de Dans le Bain. En moins d’un an, le podcast s’est imposé comme un espace de transmission, de rencontres et de dialogue au sein de la scène photographique contemporaine, notamment partenaire de Print Paris et des Rencontres d’Arles 2026.

Au fil de cet échange, il est question de mentorat, de photographie comme artisanat, du rôle des espaces culturels dans les trajectoires créatives, mais aussi de l’importance de créer des communautés fondées sur le partage et la connaissance.

Avec Roxane Moreau, photographe et fondatrice de Dans le Bain Podcast

Athens-based visual artist Valentina Bartolini develops a body of work shaped by proto-surrealist sensibilities, where intuition, memory, and interior landscapes converge.

Through drawings that drift away from the external world toward the unconscious, Bartolini allows forms to emerge slowly, guided by attentive observation and a process rooted in introspection.

On the occasion of the exhibition, the artist also welcomed LA DÉRIVE for a studio visit, photographed through the lens of @nicktsiro

Her solo show entitled BELLY OF THE FISH conceives the belly as an enclosed, transformative space. Presented at CALLIRRHOË GALLERY until 21 March, the show alludes to spiritual imagery of the inner world, such as the belly of the whale in the story of Jonah.

Recurring motifs such as mirrors and biomorphic figures evoke the sea, the womb, and other spaces of transformation, where bodies dissolve into fluid, interspecies forms.

Central to her practice is the use of handmade Nepalese Lamali paper, crafted from Kozo bamboo and Lokta fibers, traditionally employed in calligraphy.

Working meticulously with colored pencils and stencils, she constructs her images through constellations of tiny dots, allowing enigmatic creatures and crystalline fragments to emerge from the surface itself.

In this delicate interplay between materiality and imagination, Bartolini’s work becomes a meditation on memory, metamorphosis, and the fragile thresholds between the visible and the imagined.

-

CULTURE IN MOTION
with @bartolini_valentina_
@callirrhoe_
@nicktsiro

Annie’s girlhood is in some ways a paralysis. She dreams of the future and wallows in the past.

I stand on the threshold of the MEZZANINE space, precisely under its roller garage door, without fully entering just yet. The gallery feels airy and breezy, still holding onto the chill of an early April evening. The voluminous tulle skirt of a baby blue ballroom dress hangs suspended mid-air, weightless - the brightest interruption in an otherwise sparse layout, immediately pulling the eye. As I walk closer towards it, a little white cup, turned upside down in the middle of the floor, emits sounds from within; black and white confetti is scattered next to the wall, which faintly reads in cursive je ne taper plus les garçons (I shamefully admit I wait for someone else to translate). Opposite - a small staircase leading - nowhere? somewhere secret perhaps? - its base marked by a nearly hidden treble clef.

The longer I look, the more details begin to reveal themselves, bulging out from a space that at first seemed half-empty. The minimalist exhibition unfolds less as a display than as a process of deciphering - assembling Annie, a blonde, French girl who is in her teenage years, or perhaps just stuck there mentally, in her prom dress, dancing around, singing her lonely songs (Kelly), from fragments that never quite resolve. They pull her apart like magnets. Her girlhood is a caricature of another’s, perhaps one she saw on TV or heard in a ‘love’ song written by a man, one she is conditioned to believe is ideal. She lives to play her part. She lives inside a comic-strip (Jo). Perhaps she didn’t know that an audience was actually there? She might live in that dimension below, or just beyond the thin veil - this would certainly explain her ghostliness.

I approach Jo and Kelly and ask if that’s Annie’s debut exhibition?

Turns out, it is! Annie Versailles is her own debut - and yet not quite her own. She is the nom de plume under which Jo Ackerley and Kelly Wu’s art practices meet, finding an outlet to overlap and intertwine. Working together since 2022, their lives have now become what Kelly describes as a wonderful amalgamate: I would say that as a result of our relationship being mostly intuition-led, things rarely get lost or compromised in the process (...) In cases like Annie Versailles, we will share the same or very similar visual language, drawn from the pulp of our day-to-day lives together, our conversation, our current influences - a sort of telepathy which comes from familiarity (Kelly).

But the works are rarely made together in a literal sense. Instead, operating this intuitive visual language, the two artists develop them, independently, to then meet each other in the gallery space, where the exhibition itself becomes the site of negotiation. We collaborate in thoughts and ideas - Jo notes - but materially we work quite separately. There is, in this sense, no true merging, but a form of adjacency.

Annie seems to emerge from the gap between the two practices that lovingly co-exist yet refuse to collapse into one another. She embodies this tension, appearing only through partial coherence - an ethereal, almost Coppola-esque figure assembled from fragments. This recalls something close to Lacanian méconnaissance: a subject that seems whole only insofar as it is constructed through external images and fictions, sustained by a necessary belief in its own coherence. But here, that coherence is never singular. It is doubled, split across two artists who slowly started to wax towards the feminine. Annie’s invention turns on the archetype of white femininity as something both desired and structurally unattainable - a figure continuously produced as aspiration, yet unreachable even to white women themselves. As Kelly suggests, at some point everyone hits the ceiling, and the only way through is perhaps to become French: to slip into a fantasy of distance, softness, and stylised escape that never quite resolves into reality. And perhaps, inevitably, to put on a show.

Is she self-aware or kind of lost in it?

Lost in it. (Kelly)

Both. (Jo)

FULL CONVERSATION WITH THE ARTISTS

What’s it like working as a duo? When your two practices merge, what gets lost or compromised in the process?

KELLY: Jo and I have been working together since 2022. We now live, work, and study together, so our lives have become quite a wonderful amalgamate. This is not to say that we do not have our individual practices, as we very much do, but rather that what we share is much more than what we do not share.

I have always found Jo to be an amazing source of inspiration for me, and I have loved making things together from the very beginning – we used to do something called ‘popcorn drawing,’ which is essentially just an abstracted version of exquisite corpse.

Aside from small, insignificant works, we rarely work together on singular pieces, which is what I think people imagine a collaboration to be like. Instead, we tend to work on our own pieces, which in cases like Annie Versailles, will share the same or a very similar visual language. This language is something intuitive which is drawn from the pulp of our day-to-day lives together, our conversations, and our current influences. It is a sort of telepathy which comes from familiarity with one another. The works will then meet each other in the gallery space, and the exhibition-making is where we may begin to butt heads.

Working in this way has panned out well for us historically – we did two shows, one in 2023 and one in 2024, under the exhibition title warren, where we also exhibited individual pieces but collaborated on the curatorial decisions.

I would say that as a result of our relationship being mostly intuition-led, things rarely get lost or compromised in the process, however ideas and exhibitions can, naturally, lean more into one person’s practice than another’s, dependant on need.

Annie is definitely a great combination of the two of us, and I am looking forward to making more work under her name in the future.

JO: We work well together. Most of the work happens telepathically. We sometimes argue over invisible details, but we get things done quickly. I don’t think our practices ever completely merge. We collaborate in thoughts and ideas, but materially we work quite separately, so there is little compromise. Neither of us could accept too much compromise. Ultimately, our practices are inherently tied to our hearts, so stringing one to another is tricky, but not impossible. Opening my heart is like petting a fox.

You have a pretty minimalist approach, do you think a work fails by revealing too much?

KELLY: When I first started making art, I was, hilariously, very maximalist, and enjoyed using a lot of stuff (found objects) to make these scenes that I used to describe as ‘bitty.’ My influences used to be Annette Messager, Veronica Ryan, Sarah Sze, Eva Hesse… artists like that, who, I felt, assembled small things together to make a satisfying and busy bigger picture. Whilst I still love their work, in the last few years I have been much more focused on conceptual artists such as Yoko Ono, and in particular Lee Lozano, who did some amazing ‘life-art’ towards the end of her career. In loving Yoko and E I have delved a lot into minimalism and that so-loved era of New York in the 60s. Male artists such as Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra, et al., although I am not much influenced by them.

I do not think that a work can ‘reveal too much’ – it is all about the intention of the artist I suppose and whether or not they want the work to avoid interpretation. I like for my works to be interpreted, even if wrongly, just as much as I like my original ideas. I think it’s all very interesting and part of the bigger fun of showing work in a public space.

With this all being said, I really do enjoy obscure, selfish works, as long as I can feel that there is a heart beating somewhere in the middle.

JO: Yes, in a way, because I think the audience should have something to do. I don’t want them to just stand and admire, because there are other things that do better to sit there and be admired: trees, mountains, huge statues of deities, &c. My work will never be Beautiful like those things. My approach to minimalism is such that what you do show is concentrated, but I do like to leave holes. Sometimes actual holes. Tension is important to me, so I think if a work reveals too much, and the tension dissipates, then yes, maybe the work fails. Although sometimes you can reveal the killer at the beginning and it still works.

What kind of girlhood is Annie performing?

KELLY: Like all of us, Annie is, yes, performing girlhood. She is a girl, but is also… performing girlhood. She is a mixture of many real and fake things, but lives mostly in our minds as a blonde, French girl. For me in particular, she is in her teenage years, or perhaps a little bit after the fact. At least, she is mentally stuck there, in her prom dress, dancing around, singing her lonely songs.

Annie’s invention mainly explores the white woman as the conditioned archetype, and as an aspiration that even the white women themselves cannot reach. At some point, in this world, everyone hits the ceiling, and the only way through is perhaps to become French.

JO: Annie’s girlhood is in some ways a paralysis. She dreams of the future and wallows in the past. They pull her apart like magnets. Her girlhood is a caricature of another’s, perhaps one she saw on TV or heard in a ‘love’ song written by a man, one she is conditioned to believe is ideal. She lives to play her part. She lives inside a comic-strip. Maybe what comes out in the exhibition is what she dreams at night – the truth comes out, but nonsense too. Annie likes music and reading. She is a bit like us.

Is it Annie’s debut exhibition? Why did she decide to put it on? Would she continue with her art practice or was it a one off thing spawned out of her boredom and sadness?

KELLY: Yes, Annie Versailles at MEZZANINE was Annie’s debut exhibition, although Jo and I have worked together before on two shows in 2023 and 2024, under the recurring title of warren. ‘Warren’ quickly turned into ‘Annie’ slowly as we both started waxing more towards femininity.

Annie had to have her first exhibition because she is us; she is an artist, and artists put on public shows. Still, there is a part of me that thinks that she did not know that an audience was actually there – perhaps she lives in that dimension below, or just beyond the thin veil. This would certainly explain her ghostliness.

And although we love fictionalising her, I think it is important to read Annie as a brainchild of Jo and I, and in doing so understanding that her ‘motivations’ for making work are aligned with ours, in that we are, under Annie, all one and the same. She and I make work because we are sad, happy, experiencing things, not experiencing things. Artwork is our collective outlet.

I like your reading of her ‘boredom’ because I certainly think that is a factor of her personality, although I hadn’t really thought about it before. I think that she is bored because she is alone in that ‘beyond the thin veil’ place

JO: Yes, this was Annie’s first show. K and I have done duo shows before this one, butnone as A.V. We put it on because we express ourselves through exhibitions. Ever since our last show together, we have been waiting for the right circumstances to do the next one. We are always making art, and it is what we will always do. Putting on shows is fun. Annie Versailles will have another show. She would put on a show whatever the weather. We both get bored and sad. I get very bored, very quickly. Our collaboration spawned out of our love for each other and the fact that we are both artists.

Is she self-aware or kind of lost in it?

KELLY: Lost in it.

JO: Both.

VIEW THE FULL MOVIE HERE

At the core of situationist thinking lies a simple intuition: our environments are never neutral. They shape perception, movement, and identity, just as we continuously reshape them in return. Objects, too, participate in this exchange: they accumulate presence, they reorganize space and sometimes, they ask to be displaced.

This sensitivity to lived environments is central to Out the Window, a collaborative project by filmmaker Marguerite Ranger and ceramicist , in which a hand-built vessel is deliberately dropped from the window of the artist’s Montreal studio. The gesture is abrupt, almost humorous at first glance. Yet what unfolds through the film is something quieter: a reflection on attachment, spatial awareness, and the subtle agency objects can acquire in our lives.

Édith Sévigny Martel’s ceramic practice emerges from an intuitive relationship to material. Working primarily through pinch and coiling techniques, she constructs large vessels whose surfaces retain the trace of touch. Her forms carry a bodily softness, simultaneously fragile and grounded and often navigating the dualities embedded within feminine experience. Ranger’s practice, moving across video, analog photography, and drawing, similarly approaches images as emotional carriers, treating archives and memories as living material.

Their collaboration developed organically. The two first met through pottery classes Sévigny Martel was teaching, and over time a shared sensitivity towards the artistic process emerged. When the ceramicist began considering the possibility of documenting the destruction of one of her works, Ranger became the natural interlocutor.

“I couldn’t see the piece anymore,” Sévigny Martel explains. The vessel had begun to saturate the studio environment, occupying the space with an intensity that exceeded its physical scale. What began as a joking suggestion among friends (throw it out the window!) gradually revealed itself as something else: a gesture capable of transforming the relationship between object and environment.

From her cinematic eye, Ranger approached the action not as spectacle, but as inquiry. What happens when an object takes up too much psychic space? What does it mean to remove it? Can destruction become a form of attention rather than disappearance?

Filming the fall introduced an immediate paradox : the ceramic object would be lost materially, yet preserved through moving image. In documenting the gesture, the work shifted from sculpture into time-based experience. “There’s something interesting about destroying a material piece but ensuring its survival elsewhere,” Ranger notes.

When asked about the film’s production process, there was a need to highlight that the moment itself proved more charged than expected. Both artists describe the action as surprisingly violent. Sévigny Martel recalls feeling detached beforehand, only to experience an unexpected emotional response afterward. “It was surprisingly emotional, like a breakup” she says.

The speed of the fall contrasted sharply with the slowness of the vessel’s making. Years of tactile familiarity collapsed into a single instant. What remained was not absence, but a new awareness: an energetic dimension embedded within objects themselves.

For Sévigny Martel, the gesture raised questions about the ethos of ceramic practice: ceramics is traditionally a discipline of construction and preservation. To destroy a vessel is to interrupt that lineage. Yet the interruption revealed something else: an expanded sensitivity to what objects carry beyond intention.

For Ranger, the film opened another possibility: that destruction might function as a form of desacralization that ultimately produces attachment rather than erasing it. The softness of the vessel, its almost bodily presence, became more perceptible once it disappeared.

If situationism proposes that experience is constructed through encounters with space, then Out the Window stages such an encounter directly. The studio becomes a site of transformation; the window becomes a threshold, and the fall becomes an event.

In this sense, the gesture operates like a small dérive within the studio itself: a displacement that interrupts habit and reorganizes perception. Rather than documenting an ending, the film records a shift in relation: between object and environment, presence and release.

Here, destruction becomes less a rupture than a constructed situation: a way of making space for another way of seeing to emerge.

MARGUERITE RANGER

EDITH SEVIGNY MARTEL

In Montreal’s winter months, when the city often retreats inward, certain spaces begin to glow quietly with creative activity. Among them are the gatherings imagined by ODE, an event designer whose work sits somewhere between creative direction, community-building, and scenographic experimentation.

Her latest project, NÜ, unfolds as a series of live nude drawing sessions that combine artistic practice with immersive event design. Conceived as both a creative ritual and a social gathering, the project invites artists, designers, and curious participants to share a contemplative moment around the act of drawing the naked human body.

Photographed for LA DÉRIVE by Montreal-based photographer Alexis Monet, the sessions reveal an atmosphere that feels at once intimate and carefully orchestrated; where music, lighting, scenography, and human presence merge into a single sensory experience.

But NÜ is not simply a drawing session. It is the latest expression of ODE’s evolving practice as an event designer whose work revolves around creating encounters.

FROM HOSPITALITY TO CREATIVE DIRECTION

Before launching her own projects, ODE’s path moved through several worlds.

She initially studied hospitality at Montreal’s Institut de Tourisme et d’Hôtellerie du Québec, drawn to the event-driven dimension of the field. Yet her interests quickly extended beyond traditional hospitality into the creative industries: design, fashion, architecture, and cultural production. “I’ve always been attracted to spaces where different disciplines meet,” she explains.

That instinct gradually became the foundation of her practice. Rather than organizing events in the conventional sense, ODE began to approach them as curatorial environments: spaces where music, scenography, people, and atmosphere could come together to produce a shared experience.

Her name itself reflects this philosophy. ODE is both a personal nickname and a conceptual statement: an ode to beauty, to design, and to the sensory dimension of gatherings. “I’m interested in creating environments where people can feel something,” she says. “Where the senses are activated.”

THE BIRTH OF NÜ

The project NÜ emerged gradually through a series of experiments.

Through these experiments, Ode collaborated with Cassandre Brillant, director of Espace Loüable, a rentable creative space in Montreal. The two first met during a traditional life-drawing session and quickly realised their interests aligned. While one assumed the creative and curatorial direction, the other worked on artistic and visual production.

The first edition took place in September 2025, followed by a winter holiday brunch session. With each iteration, the audience evolved while maintaining a central element: the act of drawing. “The drawing is essential,” Ode explains. “It’s what grounds the event.”

For the third edition, titled Mille et une nuits, the two collaborators imagined a scenographic environment inspired by the magical and sensual atmosphere of the Arabian Nights tales: a world that allowed them to step briefly outside the darkness of winter. “We wanted something luminous, mysterious,” ODE recalls. “A moment of discovery.”

The event attracted a diverse audience: artists, designers, curious newcomers. For many participants, it became less about producing perfect drawings than about experiencing a moment of creative suspension.

At the end of the evening, something unexpected happened : participants stayed. They gathered around the drawings scattered across tables, discussing their interpretations, sharing perspectives, and lingering long after the session had officially ended.

For ODE, this moment captured the essence of her work : “My role is to create the conditions for encounters.”

EVENT DESIGN AS CREATIVE PRACTICE

ODE describes her process as highly intuitive. “I go with the flow,” she says. “A lot of it comes from instinct.”

Music plays a central role in shaping the atmosphere of her events. As creative director, she carefully curates sound environments that support the emotional tone of the space. Lighting, scenography, spatial arrangement, and the subtle olfactory presence of palo santo follow the same logic, each element contributing to a layered sensory narrative.

An aesthete at heart, Ode crafts immersive worlds inspired by representations of the body throughout art history. Simultaneously, her taste tends toward the organic and the raw: an eclectic mix of influences drawn from architecture, fashion, innovative design and classical references. “I’m attracted to things that are sensual and a bit avant-garde,” she says. “Even if they’re slightly shocking.” Yet the intention is never provocation for its own sake. “What matters is the emotion it creates and the impact it has on broader ideas (body diversity, self-love, empowered sensuality and sexuality)”.

In this sense, ODE’s work occupies a hybrid space between event design and creative direction. She moves fluidly between roles; curator, producer, scenographer, ultimately assembling people and ideas that might not obviously belong together. “The essence of my work is creating links,” she explains. “Bringing together talents and universes that wouldn’t necessarily make sense on paper, but that become harmonious when they meet.”

THE BODY AS A COLLECTIVE EXPERIENCE

At the centre of NÜ lies the act of drawing the human body. Life drawing has long been a foundational practice within art education, yet ODE approaches it less as an academic exercise than as a communal ritual.

For participants, the sessions offer a rare moment of quiet concentration: phones disappear, conversation softens, hands move slowly across paper. The atmosphere becomes almost meditative. “It’s fascinating to watch,” ODE says. “You see people’s talent emerging. You see how everyone interprets the same body differently.”

Inclusivity plays a crucial role in shaping the project. Representation, body diversity, and respect for models remain central concerns. Exposure to living bodies, she believes, can be both artistic and therapeutic. “There’s something very powerful about seeing real bodies,” she explains. “It reconnects people with something very human.”

In previous projects, ODE herself has taken on the role of model: an experience she describes as both empowering and unexpectedly challenging. “When you’re modelling, you have to detach,” she says. “You’re not Audrey anymore. You become the muse people are drawing.”

At the same time, the experience brings a new awareness of vulnerability. The model becomes the centre of a silent collective gaze. “It’s very contemplative,” she reflects.

ON DESIGNING ENCOUNTERS

Beyond NÜ, ODE’s ambitions continue to expand.

Her interests stretch across design disciplines: architecture, object design, interior spaces, cultural programming, curating and fashion events. She is drawn to large-scale creative gatherings, from design fairs to fashion weeks: where multiple creative worlds intersect.

At the same time, she is increasingly focused on documenting and archiving her work. “I want to take more control of my creative vision,” she says. “To document projects, develop communication around them, and build a visual archive.” Photography definitely plays an important role in that process.

The images captured by Alexis Monet for LA DÉRIVE continue this documentation, revealing the atmosphere of NÜ as something both intimate and carefully constructed.

Looking ahead, ODE hopes to remain primarily in the realm of creative conception rather than operational logistics. “What excites me is the beginning of projects,” she explains. “The creative spark. The people you meet. The unexpected connections.”

In many ways, the philosophy echoes the spirit of LA DÉRIVE itself: a movement guided less by rigid structure than by curiosity and encounter. And perhaps that is precisely what makes ODE’s work resonate.

In a world where cultural events often prioritise spectacle or scale, her gatherings remind us that creativity can still emerge from something much simpler: a room, a body, a few sheets of paper, and the quiet possibility that strangers might leave having created something together.

Dedicated to Situationism and to the many ways its spirit continues to resonate through contemporary creative practices, this inaugural edition brings together a constellation of artists, writers, photographers, and creative voices navigating culture in motion.

Printed in Paris and released in limited quantities, each hand-numbered copy includes a selection of stickers and bookmarks produced for the launch of Issue 01.

Purchase via website or private message <3

GET YOUR COPY

LA DÉRIVE

by Solveig Wilson Carrier

STUDIO VON SCHOENEBECK is a Munich-based design studio founded by designer Johannes von Schoenebeck and art historian / filmmaker Magdalena Shterianova. Situated at the intersection of collectible design, functional art, and narrative construction, their practice approaches objects less as endpoints than as containers of material transformation, cultural memory, and shared human experience.

I first encountered their work during Design Week in Paris, through the Tetris Candelabras exhibited at GSL Gallery’s Salon de Septembre. What struck me immediately was not only the visual language of the pieces, but the ethos underpinning them.

Months later, I had the pleasure of properly meeting them to uncover the roots of their practice. Seated between references to fire, cultural heritage, and social ritual, our conversation unfolded as an exchange on creative duality, material transformation, and the importance of communal and narrative-driven design.

TWO TRAJECTORIES, ONE PRACTICE

Solveig Carrier: You both come from very different backgrounds. How did those trajectories shape the foundation of the studio?

Johannes Von Schoenebeck: I was trained very traditionally: furniture design, functionalism, minimalism. For a long time, I was interested in precision, structure, and technical mastery. But eventually, I felt constrained by that. I wanted more space for conceptual thinking.

Magdalena Shterianova: I come from art history and film. Outside academia, I always imagined myself working with moving image, but I reached a point where everything felt too abstract and found myself craving materiality.

JVS: We realized quite quickly that we were asking the same questions, just from different angles.

Briefly into our exchange, Studio Von Schoenebeck immediately struck me as an ideal showcase of interdisciplinary creation. Ultimately, what emerges is not only a fusion of disciplines, but a shared curiosity examining how ideas can become tangible, and how objects can carry meaning beyond function.

FROM OBJECTS TO SITUATIONS

SC: Tetris is one of your earliest collaborative projects. Can you tell me how it rooted your common philosophy to design?

MS: It was actually very organic. Tetris wasn’t designed as a candleholder in isolation. We were actually responding to a social tradition.

JVS: Exactly. The first prototypes were developed in relation to the Kocherlball in Munich: a traditional folk gathering that happens very early in the morning in beer gardens, lit by candlelight. For the celebration, we placed said candleholder directly onto the tables during the event. And then people started taking real interest in them right there, in the middle of the celebration, which proved to be eye-opening.

MS: Alongside demonstrating the potential of these objects as collectibles, it showed us that production can’t be separated from context. Objects should originate from situations, not markets.

FIRE AS SHARED LANGUAGE

SC: One thing that stands out about your recent work is that fire seems to play a central role in the design. What is your relationship to it ? Was it always present in your individual practices?

JVS: Yes. During my time at the Royal College of Art, I started experimenting with burning furniture; using destruction as a way of constructing form. For me, fire is functional. It’s a tool. It’s also a gathering point: something humans have always gathered around.

MS: For me, fire is more sensible. A few years back, I developed a photographic series around traces left after fires. I’ve also held great fascination understanding the impact of historical moments like The Great Chicago Fire. Ultimately, that is connected to a traumatic experience of my childhood when my family home burned down. (...) So there’s an emotional charge present.

Though their relationships to fire differ, they converge in a shared understanding of fire as both a material force and a cultural constant; capable of shaping form while activating collective memory.

ON COMMUNITY AS MATERIAL

SC: How does your appreciation of community intertwine with your approach to design?

MS: We’re interested in situations where objects become catalysts, gathering people around them, provoking reaction, shared experience.

MS: We tested this through a design performance with fire at Easter bonfires in rural Bavaria. While some communities were very open, others completely rejected it (...)

JVS: Both reactions were important. They showed us where resonance exists. For us, community is not an audience. It’s an active component of the work.

Johannes adds that experience has to come first; otherwise there is no story to tell. He traces this thinking back to his time at the Royal College of Art, where he began imagining design not as selling a finished object, but as offering an experience.

And ultimately, the story they pursue through design is that of human experience.

ON NARRATIVE-DRIVEN DESIGN

SC: I’m curious about your wider influences, especially cultural heritage, and the presence of literature, film, and philosophy across your projects. Where does this narrative dimension enter your practice?

For Studio Von Schoenebeck, narrative is not something layered onto an object after its conception. It operates at the level of structure.

From the literary-inspired Master & Margarita chair, to the ritualistic Tetris candelabras, and forthcoming works engaging with Stoic philosophy and classical columns, design becomes a form of storytelling that is embedded rather than illustrated.

MS & JVS: We’re not illustrating stories. We’re building structures that can hold themes. Literature, film, philosophy, and history function as conceptual frameworks rather than visual references. They shape the internal logic of each piece, allowing objects to carry abstract yet universal conditions.

ON EMANCIPATION

SC: Looking ahead, what is next for you ?

Faced with this question, Johannes and Magdalena speak less about expansion in conventional terms and more about gaining freedom: freedom from parallel occupations, freedom to deepen research, and freedom to move between objects, film, installation, and long-form series.

In a design landscape often oriented toward fixed outcomes, Studio Von Schoenebeck rather proposes a practice oriented toward continuous inquiry: one where design operates as a container for meaning, experience, and resonance.

Words by Arina Baburskova

Is it even possible to see The Ballad of Sexual Dependency for the first time anymore? By now, its images - darkened sketchy interiors; light catching on the bruises left by an abusive lover; fragile figures sprawled across unmade beds, post-coitally fatigued; faces turned toward mirrors, gazing directly at us, from the unsafety of their toilet seats - feel less like encounters and more like recognitions: already semi-remembered, pre-seen somewhere, an art history lecture? a niche café photobook? a story repost? or just the general visual soup of the internet, really. Which is why, on a quick lunchtime visit to Gagosian Davies Street, London, being told no photos came as a minor conceptual shock.

Not because the images felt private, actually because they already felt familiar. The photograph in question (the one I tried to unsuccessfully capture as in): Trixie on the Cot, New York City, 1979. A white dress, blood-stained with red flowers, ghostly, almost synthetic makeup and skin even paler under harsh light, contrasting with black hair falling across her face. Faceless, Trixie seemed to belong to a visual memory already formed. I had written about this image before actually - back at university - my eyes had already crawled over its surface, as I’m sure many others’ have, too. But still the image feels provocative in its tenderness, punk, underground, raw in a way that is insistently female-gazey. You consume it, hungrily. It is not hard to find online.

Which is what made the prohibition feel odd, and raised a more awkward question than the one I came in with: what exactly is being protected here, the images themselves, or the conditions under which they are allowed to be seen?

If The Ballad of Sexual Dependency feels familiar now, it is not only because it has been widely reproduced, but because it was never entirely private to begin with. When Nan Goldin (b.1953) described it as ‘the diary I let people read,’ the emphasis falls on permission, rather than some sort of sacred confession. These images - made between 1973 and 1986 - emerged from within the queer and underground clubs and bars of late-70s and early-80s New York, where they were first shown as slideshows to handpicked music that ranged from Maria Callas to The Velvet Underground. What they staged was a form of radical intimacy, collectively lived and made visible within a specific social world.

This is what gives the work its particular charge. Goldin’s photographs collapse the distance between document and display: they are at once records of experience and part of the experience itself. To photograph one’s life like that is in a way to shape it, but also to share it - to turn intimacy into something that circulates. Long before the infrastructure of the internet made such dynamics banal, these images were already operating within a shared visual economy: seen, recognised, and passed between those who understood themselves through them. In this sense, they come close to what Lauren Berlant would later describe as an ‘intimate public’: a space in which personal life is not simply exposed, but collectively inhabited. To look at them now is not just to witness intimacy, but to encounter a form of it that was always structured around being seen.

What began as a slideshow among friends, dragged between apartments, bars, and borrowed projectors, later fixed in the 1986 photobook, now finds itself restaged in a single, immaculate room at Gagosian Davies Street. Usually visible from the street, the gallery’s glass has been frosted over; even the passing glance is withheld. The photographs have not become rarer rather their appearance here is newly controlled.

If these images no longer shock, it is not because they have lost their original edge, but because we have caught up with them. The aesthetics of exposure they once staged - disclosure, vulnerability, the collapsing of public and private - now form the baseline of contemporary visual culture, a post-internet intimacy. We are used to seeing everything. Intimacy is no longer perceived as rupture but as something already formatted, understood and digested for us. Goldin’s photographs do not so much reveal as confirm. You don’t encounter them for the first time, but recognise them, almost before you’ve had the chance to properly look.

What changes, then, under the conditions of the gallery environment, is not the image itself but the terms of that recognition. To look without photographing, to see without sharing - this feels slightly out of joint, if not entirely unfamiliar. These are, after all, habits the images themselves helped produce. Intimacy is cut loose from its afterlife. You cannot keep or repost it, cannot fold it back into the endless circulation from which it came. Whether this restores something like an aura, or simply stages the appearance of one, is difficult to say.

Words by Solveig Wilson Carrier

Walking into Ciaccia Levi’s Paris space on Rue de Turbigo, I had originally come to speak about one artist: Leonardo Devito. His work had caught my attention at Paris Internationale with those attenuated palettes, Early-Renaissance and Modernist echoes, and unexpectedly subterranean moods that seemed to shift between theatre and dream. But as often happens with gallerists whose worlds run deeper than a single exhibition, my conversation with Antoine Levi unfurled far beyond one artist. Devito became a point of departure, acting as a gateway into the gallery’s ethos, its relationship to craft, and the dual universes in which it operates: Paris and Milan.

LEONARDO DEVITO: A LANGUAGE BORN FROM HYBRID INHERITANCE

“Leonardo is undeniably an artist in orbit,” Levi tells me. He first encountered Devito four years ago; they have been working together for two. In that time, the artist has moved with rare velocity: two solos with the gallery, presentations at Paris Internationale, and a growing interest from renowned institutions, including collaborations with Hauser & Wirth.

Born in Florence in 1997 and now based in Turin, Devito pulls from Renaissance techniques with what could be described as a “magical-surrealist detour.” His canvases begin as fixed images that deliberately unravel during the act of painting; resisting the monumental, embracing the unpredictable. Childhood recurs throughout the work, not in sentimentality but as a form of purification: a way to construct an imagery freed from academic weight.

Beyond painting, Devito works in bas-relief, etching, silverpoint, and terracotta; the latter connecting him directly to ancient Italian techniques he plans to deepen during an upcoming residency in Sicily. “What seduced us first,” Levi explains, “was the way he metabolises Italian artistic heritage: metaphysics, Surrealismo Magico artists such as Cagnaccio di San Pietro. But instead of quoting, he hybridises. He builds a language rather than an homage.”

His year ahead is densely mapped: ceramic production in Sicily, a research residency in Porto, several solos, and a confidential project involving theatrical scenography. “He builds metaphysical landscapes,” Levi adds, “almost like action theatre.”

TRANSMISSION AS CULTURAL COMPASS

When I ask how Ciaccia Levi chooses its artists, Levi answers without hesitation: transmission. It is not a slogan, but a principle that threads across the gallery’s artists. He lists examples as if mapping constellations:

SRIJON CHOWDHURY, who carries forward strands of surrealism, who carries forward strands of surrealism, sacral and almost religious imagery as well as floral mythologies.

ZOË WILLIAMS, whose work moves through Rococo, performance, and video.

DANIEL JACOBY, who navigates personal ancestry through video and fragmented socio-political histories of Peru.

FRANCESCO GENNARI, with his metaphysical-baroque sensibilities.

GARANCE FRÜTH, who interrogates fragility and the social architectures of the female body.

KENNY DUNCAN, whose practice returns to Guadeloupean craft traditions: tanning, leatherwork, botanical knowledge.

Beyond lineage, Levi insists on something less easily defined yet indispensable today: the artist’s personal implication in their work. Not all practices, he notes, are grounded in this level of engagement. What Ciaccia Levi seeks is the presence of the human: an emotional, ethical, and intellectual investment that exceeds formal coherence.

The gallery’s roster reflects this openness: artists shaped by interdisciplinary paths, some emerging from cinema, others from fields as distant as law, bringing with them an impressive sense of humanity and lived experience that permeates their artistic production. What matters, Levi continues, is neither style nor medium, but the degree of intimacy an artist is willing to reveal. “It’s the most universal thing,” he says.

His commitment to artists is pedagogical in the deepest sense, encouraging a step backward into research, technique, and history in order to move forward with clarity and solidity. “The gallery’s role,” he concludes, “is a duty of proposition. Museums affirm, while galleries propose.”

CRAFT AS CULTURAL INFRASTRUCTURE : ITALY AND FRANCE

As we speak about technique, the conversation naturally shifts toward the infrastructures that allow artists to experiment. Here, Levi becomes animated. In Italy, he explains, craft is still alive: not romanticised, but functional. Ceramicists, glassworkers, metalworkers: artisans remain embedded in the cultural fabric, accessible, imaginative, and artistically literate. “They all have an artistic fibre,” he says. “They don’t execute; they collaborate.”

France, by contrast, has preserved craft under corporatist structures that render it rarefied, costly, and less porous. “In France, artisans are métiers d’art and the financial pressure narrows the imagination. If you want quality, you pay heavily. In Italy, quality is part of life. The knowledge is preserved, and so is the poetry.” This divide shapes artistic production, and ultimately, the role of the gallerist.

TWO CITIES, TWO IDENTITIES: PARIS AND MILAN

This reflection leads naturally to the question of Paris and Milan, Ciaccia Levi’s two homes. Paris, Levi tells me, is a city shaped by museographical sensitivity. Exhibitions here carry a certain classical gravity; expectations are high, the market structured, and production costs often prohibitive for younger galleries. In return, Paris offers a rigor of discourse and institutional legitimacy that remains largely unmatched.

Milan, by contrast, is porous. Historically perceived as Italy’s “mirror city” to Paris, it operates through a different cultural metabolism: one animated by magazines such as Domus, Mousse, and Flash Art, by design and fashion, and by a deeply rooted tradition of craftsmanship. “Milan is where we allow ourselves to be experimental,” Levi explains. Earlier this year, the gallery made a decisive shift, stepping away from traditional exhibitions to reimagine the space as a research centre and laboratory dedicated to multiples and editions. There, artists from the gallery’s roster collaborate with local creatives to produce objects that expand the notion of collectability: posters priced between €10 and €15, caps at €45, or a small photograph by Zoe Williams available for €80.

For Levi, this approach is essential. “Democratising collection-building matters,” he insists. “Young collectors need points of entry. Art cannot exist only at the scale of monuments.” Once again, Nerina Ciaccia and Antoine Levi articulate a clear intention: not only to support emerging artists, but also to cultivate emerging collectors, opening access to artistic dialogue through more immediate, accessible forms. Milan thus becomes a site of experimentation in the truest sense - one where the art object can be improvised, multiplied, and reimagined, allowing artists greater freedom of expression while inviting a new generation into the act of collecting.

THE ROOTS OF CIACCIA LEVI

Behind CIACCIA LEVI stand two distinct trajectories, shaped by different geographies, disciplines, and encounters with contemporary art.

NERINA CIACCIA, originally from Italy’s Adriatic coast, studied in Bologna and Turin before working with a.titolo, an association dedicated to contemporary art in public space. Her practice quickly extended beyond Italy, leading her to establish THE OFFICE in Tirana, where she developed a sustained engagement with Balkan contemporary art. This period was marked by a commitment to underrepresented scenes.

ANTOINE LEVI‘s path unfolded along more academic lines. Trained in medieval illumination to the doctoral level, his trajectory shifted decisively upon encountering the unsettling work of Paul McCarthy, a rupture that drew him irreversibly toward contemporary art. He went on to work with galleries in Madrid before directing Franco Noero in Turin from 2005 to 2010, a formative experience that sharpened his understanding of gallery-making as both intellectual and structural practice.

In 2013, Ciaccia and Levi opened their first space in Paris with just €5,000, anchoring the gallery initially in Belleville before relocating to Arts et Métiers in 2020. A second space followed in Milan in 2022. When I ask Levi why Paris, his answer is immediate: “Because the sensitivity here is unique.” He pauses, then adds more soberly, “But it’s impossible to ignore that the space for young galleries is shrinking.”

It is at this point in our conversation that the discussion widens beyond the gallery itself. As a final question, I ask Antoine Levi what he considers to be the duo’s greatest achievement and the most significant lesson learned so far. He takes a moment to reflect, then speaks not of Ciaccia Levi alone, but of Paris Internationale.

ON PARIS INTERNATIONALE AND THE FUTURE OF GALLERIES

Co-founded by the galleries Ciaccia Levi, Crèvecoeur and Gregor Staiger, Paris Internationale emerged from a desire to reclaim agency within a system increasingly defined by exclusion. For them, fairs are not commercial engines but ecosystems. The fair’s commitment to free public access is fundamental. “It has to be accessible: to artists, to audiences, and especially to workers,” Levi insists. “Otherwise, nothing renews itself, and you simply perpetuate the same cycle of inaccessibility.”

Building Paris Internationale, he explains, has been both a source of pride and a learning process; marked by administrative challenges, questions of identity, and the difficulty of sustaining a project that genuinely reflects the people behind it: gallerists, artists, and art professionals alike. At its core lies a belief in transmission as structural change.

Levi speaks with particular pride of former collaborators who have since gone on to work at major institutions such as the Collection Pinault. “The fair, like our gallery, is a professional lever,” he says. “Not just a marketplace. People arrived first as volunteers, then as gallery assistants, curators, each step opening another.”

As our conversation draws to a close, Levi leaves me with a thought that is both candid and quietly urgent: “In a few years, we will realise there are fewer galleries. What we can still bring, collectively, is something essential. A way of keeping the ecosystem alive.”

While Paris Internationale prepares its first Milan edition set from 18 to 21 April 2026, the gallery’s longstanding dialogue between the two cities takes on a newly expanded institutional resonance. What has long structured Ciaccia Levi’s practice as a transnational rhythm between Paris and Milan now finds a parallel form at the scale of the fair itself, extending its artist-led ethos into a second context historically shaped by publishing, design, and craft infrastructures. In this light, the Milan edition appears less as a geographical expansion than as a continuation of the same curatorial logic of circulation, experimentation, and access that has defined both the gallery’s trajectory and the defining spirit of Paris Internationale from the outset.

Written by

Luigi Iagulli

Jonah Siegel

They want you to forget the things you don’t want to forget. I took a little vacation last year. I stayed in the south of Italy outside of Agrigento, in this gorgeous villa near the Turkish steps. It had marble pillars that cracked along the seams where they had been repaired so many times. It had a garden in the back with figs and oranges. I stayed for 3 months or longer, at this point the length has escaped me. I ate bream and mussels and drank wine directly from Giuseppe’s cellar, in which he claimed he made himself. It tasted like it too. I had an eye for old tricksters like him. He spent hours telling me how when he was so and so age, he had so and so many women, and drinks, and fights. I hoped I was a good companion for him, but he kept pouring, and in the mornings I ended up forgetting I was worried about it in the first place. During the day I would walk down to the beach and look at the Germans on vacation whose cheeks got all rosy from both the sun and the wine. There was this couple I met, they spoke perfect english (and french and italian). If someone wears round glasses and has curly hair 100% of the time they are an artist. There was also her husband. Size small shirt on a size large frame. So I proposed dinner, I did the show, and went all out. Sometimes I ask myself why I do this. But I did. I made us some nice pasta. We laughed at the table until we didn’t have anything to talk about and then I sat in silence looking down and grinning. I lived in the city for too long and eventually I asked them to come see my work at the gallery. That might have been too forward after all. There’s only so much that can be expected from these kinds of people on vacation. Perhaps I’d have better luck with the fisherman.

We’ve spoken several times at this point. Him in broken English and me in shattered Italian. Every year I become more interested in fishing and can’t figure out why. I’ve equated it to kind of like how my tooth inevitably needs to be checked by the dentist for a cavity. It doesn’t hurt yet, and dental hygiene is at the front of my mind, as is the inevitability of its loss. Certainly age plays a factor. With fishing, as you get older you realize all you want is peace and quiet, but you realize once you’re all grown up and have no one to tell you to go to the dentist, it lingers. Weeks go by, months , years maybe, and that tooth will rot. Ultimately that’s exactly what will happen to those poor fish if we don’t tower over them like Jesus on floating water baiting them to eat what we provide them. Loaves were never enough for me, and I drink enough wine. Perhaps that is what it is for the fisherman. I asked him when he went out each day, and he responded, “when da fish do”. What a godly man. Or at the very least I am spiritually starved, and the lord works in mysterious italian. At any rate, he may accept my invitation for a studio visit, he understands the spiritual nature of my work better than a lustful vacationing german ever could. I awoke last night screaming over a dream where he was baptising me in the sea. His scarred hands were surprisingly gentle as he pushed me beneath the waves.

Reborn, I came out of the ocean to get a gasp of air. And all I can hear are the seagulls. They were yelling at me. Insisting to look out into the distance. So I did, and I jumped off the cliff and died. Of course, my falling woke me up, but that might have been the shortest journey I’ve ever had. Baptized and died within minutes it seemed. What did those birds want from me? And why do I care so much about the fisherman? My dreams are the same, always the same, just like those blues. You know the ones. But even they change eventually too. After a year or two of washing they move into a paler and paler existence. Levi’s even trademarked a color for them so aptly named “gates to heaven blue”. I like them that way and will rarely wear them before that point. So I put them on and marched my way to the pier in hopes to find Giuseppe. I was so excited to tell him about my dream when suddenly I was distracted by a smell. A smell I had smelt before. The kind of smell that makes you fall in love. So I followed it. Like a hound. Bloodshot eyes because of my lack of sleep. There she was, right there in front of me. A mix between my ex-lover and my mother. Perfection. Of course I managed to start up a conversation, her name was Faith.

I gave her a prompt : What does a photo look like from the perspective of a corpse? Like

Frankenstein she said. Or maybe Dahmer. Perverted and yet at the same time beautiful. I thought that was incredible. I think I’m in love. I’d let you take my photo, Go ahead. You can’t shame me. I’m already dead, even literature is dead. Because it became a trend. Even good natured academics can’t bring it back from the grave, because no matter how much we read, and recommend, and teach; in the blackest hidden pits of our hearts we yearn for Keeping up with the Kardashians.

She gave me a prompt: what does a photo look like from the perspective of a horse?

I’m definitely in love.

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Mid-October is art fair season. London and Paris pulse simultaneously with the rhythm of Frieze and Art Basel. The magnitude is impressive: hundreds of galleries, collectors, curators, and press converging across two capitals, compressing months of artistic discourse into a single week. The spectacle is undeniable, yet within its polished frenzy, something feels at disconnect.

While the global art market continues to polarize its hierarchies widening between major players and marginal scenes, independent initiatives have begun to propose new models of gathering. Among them, émergent magazine and its first-offshoot project Clarissa, a collaboration with London-based gallery Soft Commodity, offer a different rhythm of artistic conversation.

To understand what drives such projects, LA DÉRIVE spoke with Albert Riera Galceran, artist, editor, and co-founder of émergent magazine. We met in Paris, just after the launch of émergent’s fourteenth issue, a print exhibition of contemporary practice that spans continents yet remains intimately artist-led.

ON CREATING COUNTER-SPACES

Solveig Carrier: Clarissa unfolded in London during Frieze week at the very heart of the art world’s most hyper-commercial moment. How did this project come about?

Albert Riera Galceran: Reuben and I had been wanting to create a project in London for a long time. In Paris, you have several parallel events : off fairs and collective shows that offer alternatives to the main circuit. London didn’t really have that anymore, especially since Brexit.

ARG : Then, by coincidence, we met Ivo from Soft Commodity at Art Basel in June. He had access to a space in King’s Cross, available during Frieze week, and it just made sense. From there, the project evolved very naturally. Clarissa was born out of a shared need to create a space outside the system, yet within it : a space that speaks the same language but with a different tempo.

BETWEEN STRUCTURE AND FLUIDITY : WHAT IS YOUR VISION BEHIND CLARISSA ?

ARG: Clarissa doesn’t fit into a single category. It isn’t a fair, nor a gallery. The moment you call something a fair, people bring expectations that are commercial or institutional. Clarissa was deliberately open, with no fixed narrative. It’s more of a community-driven space, one that allows for dialogue, showcasing, and discovery.

In that sense, Clarissa echoes émergent’s ethos. The magazine itself functions as a curatorial statement; a printed exhibition assembling artists from different generations and geographies. Clarissa gave this same principle a body.

ON THE MEANING OF EMERGENCE

SC: Your main project, émergent magazine, carries an implicit name. What does “emergence” mean to you in this context?

ARG: For me, emergence isn’t about market visibility or career stage. We’ve always worked with artists across generations : some established, others unknown, even deceased. What matters is the energy that arises when works exist in dialogue.

At Clarissa, we avoided fragmenting things. At a fair like Frieze, everything is sectioned: “Focus,” “Main,” “Emerging.” We wanted to dissolve that hierarchical logic. You could find two radically different works in the same room, and that tension was precisely what we sought.

Emergence, in our sense, is a feeling, the moment of wonder that art provokes, rising from within.

THE ROLE OF CURATION

SC: As you’ve just mentioned, Clarissa’s curatorial process, like émergent’s, isn’t governed by market logic or institutional mandates. How would you define it ?

ARG: I can’t define our curatorial line. It’s instinctive. We’re led by intuition, by what moves us. In larger structures, there’s a need to sell a cohesive, marketable vision. But with émergent or Clarissa, we work through affinity, resonance and discovery. I will say the contextual element is primordial : pieces are elevated by a specific context, as much in their temporalities than spatialities.

Being an artist myself, I approach curation as a kind of encounter. Like falling in love : you don’t rationalize it, you feel it. That’s how I see art: attraction, curiosity, rejection, discovery. It’s an emotional process before it’s a theoretical one.

If there’s one thread connecting the artists we work with, it’s their willingness to transgress: to break conventions, to shift perception. Ultimately, context, temporality and sensibility are everything.

ON COMMUNITY

SC : Which community did Clarissa gather ?

ARG : Our community is diverse but also quite niche ; there’s artists, students, curators, collectors, people from different scenes and countries. We naturally got a hybrid of newcomers, with our audience tied to Soft Commodity’s.

ARG : But ultimately you had people from all over. That’s when you realize a project works: when it attracts people who aren’t supposed to meet but end up speaking the same language. Ultimately that’s what we want to encourage : new ways of connecting through art.

THE CHALLENGES OF INDEPENDENCE

SC : Independent projects often exist in tension with the systems they critique, operating inside the same cities, under the same conditions, but with different intentions. What were some challenges brought upon by this project ?

ARG: Obviously, the commercial dimension is impossible to ignore. Even when you try to remain independent, you still face the same practical questions: rent, logistics, production, visibility. Clarissa’s priority wasn’t to sell, but we had to acknowledge that we were still part of that ecosystem. It’s about negotiating your place within it being critical, but not cynical. In the end I learned a lot from it.

ON NAMING CLARISSA

SC: I have to ask about the name. Who is “Clarissa” ?

ARG (smiling): It started as a semi-joke. When émergent began, it was just me and Reuben. We invented “Clarissa,” our imaginary assistant. She’d send our professional emails, sign letters, even appear as a contributor in the magazine. Over time, she became a sort of ghost figure and an alter ego for the project itself.

When we were thinking of a name for this new venture, she came back to us immediately. Clarissa represents the invisible labour behind what we do : the collaborative, sometimes fictional, always collective side of creation.

AT THE CORE : PROJECTS LED BY ARTISTS

SC : Through émergent and Clarissa, you continue to explore what it means to support art as both an artist and a facilitator. How do you balance these roles ?

ARG: At our core, we’re artists. Over the years, I’ve learned to understand the curator’s role, the journalist’s lens, even the gallerist’s perspective. But it all comes back to the same thing: to look closely, to listen, to give form to others’ visions.

Looking back at my beginnings in the art world, I was producing a lot, chasing conventional success. Over time, I realized that what truly mattered was the depth of the work, not its recognition.

Now, I’m interested in what surrounds art : the contexts, the dialogues, the small movements that shape meaning, but mostly the perspective shifts that come out of all that. That’s what defines my work as a whole.

ON THE ART WORLD TODAY

SC : Having observed the art world’s evolution over the last decade, how do you read it today?

ARG: It’s complex. Brexit and COVID disrupted everything : travel, trade, attention. Some thought it would be the end of fairs. Others questioned technology’s role. There’s fatigue, but also reinvention.

With émergent, we try to create space for new voices, to give visibility to artists and ideas that might not fit traditional systems. Clarissa continues that mission.

SC: Do you feel you’ve succeeded?

ARG: In a way, yes. Success, for us, means offering people another way to connect through art, something more personal, sincere, and grounded.

MAPPING CREATIVE GEOGRAPHIES

SC : You studied art in London, are based in Barcelona and often come to Paris for work. I’m curious to know if you could define these artistic geographies ?

ARG: Interesting. I think London remains the most dynamic : great schools, international energy, constant renewal. Paris is more institutional, but changing fast, especially with its crossovers between fashion, design, and art.

Barcelona is smaller, but there’s a strong sense of community and diaspora. Many artists from there are gaining recognition across Europe. It’s a scene still in formation, but with incredible vitality. I’m proud to contribute to putting it on the map.

ON WHAT’S NEXT

SC : All of this being said, do you have a dream project ?

ARG: As a man of visual language, my natural answer has to be a film. I don’t know what it will be about yet, but I know it will have to do with essence : capturing something necessary. For me, film feels like the ultimate visual synthesis.

SC: For someone whose language is image and encounter, the idea makes perfect sense.

CLOSING REFLECTION

In the blur of October’s art calendar, Émergent and Clarissa stand as reminders that not all visibility needs to be institutional, not all success quantifiable.

They propose a different ecology of attention : one that privileges intimacy over spectacle, intuition over strategy, and dialogue over transaction.

Through these projects, the notion of emergence reclaims its truest meaning: the slow, persistent act of coming into being through artistic encounters.

PROFILE: Albert Riera Galceran

WORDS: Solveig Wilson Carrier

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