At Xxijra Hii in London, Floryan Varennes constructs an artificial medical garden of PVC, glass, and steel — where care becomes an architecture that surrounds the body and endurance becomes a subtle form of resistance.
To be cared for is also to be watched. To be healed is to be handled. Where does protection end and control begin? Even Spectres Can Tire opens with these questions and never quite settles them. With clinical control and profound sensitivity, Varennes renders his world visible through the transparent skin of materials — veins branching like fragile maps, complex steel formations suggesting a body without fully restoring it, fragments of armour that protect and confine in equal measure.
The Pixies in the show embody this condition: orthoses and apparatus that appear as possible alternatives to the body, poised between what has been and what is yet to arrive. Similar ambiguity is conveyed in the cocoon evoked in Ark — what appears as shelter also suggests isolation, a body sealed off from the world. The cocoon preserves life through enclosure, a membrane that holds the body in suspension where longevity is not redemption but endurance.
Echoing Ursula K. Le Guin's speculative worlds where fragility, transformation, and survival coexist beyond binary oppositions, Varennes constructs a suspended ecosystem of becoming. Rather than staging conquest or resolution, the works inhabit a threshold. Bodies are altered but not erased. When looking at Varennes' work, we peer into the fantasy worlds the artist experiences digitally in video games — a trace of those imagined realms lingering in the branches of Millefleurs resting on the floor.
Even Spectres Can Tire unfolds as a speculative world inhabited by spectres, where past and future overlap and unresolved histories continue to shape the present. Resonating with the concept of hauntology as theorised by Jacques Derrida, the exhibition suggests a condition in which the now is permeated by the ghosts of unfinished pasts and unrealised futures — suspended in glass, sealed in PVC, held within protective shells. The exhibition runs through April 11, 2026. Text by Francesco Pasquini.
