Someone’s Child unfolds as a sensory landscape — a modern swamp where sound, sculpture, and memory converge. It is not a space to be understood, but one to be felt — resonating like music in the body rather than the mind. This swamp becomes a kind of theater: earth and sky replay the cycle of life, an environment where beasts give birth to other beasts, where each depends on the other to live and to die. It evokes the idea of a cycle, like the Pantanal that floods, welcoming unique flora and fauna, before drying out to give rise to new species. The earth gives birth to us, raises us toward the sky, and then takes us back. And this cycle, this journey, belongs to each of us. At the center of the space rises WOMB, a creature of mud, double and pregnant, as if hiding or fleeing to prepare for its birth. At once anonymous and universal, it is neither woman nor man, neither fully human nor fully beast. It simply is. Scarecrow, mud buffalo, or witch, its multiplicity of forms opens up diverse readings. Pregnant, its body in gestation embodies the primordial beast: a resisting matrix, sprung from its own flesh — the earth — carrying within it the possibility
of rebirth. Around WOMB stand the watchers: a choir of sculptures perched on what seem to be the ruins of our civilization, rusted steel beams. Two opposing forces emerge: earth, which resists and sustains life, and steel, which collapses. The vultures sing and converse. Ambivalent, they accompany the emergence of the living while reminding us that every birth already contains its end. Their positions and forms make us oscillate in our reading of their role: hunters, watchers, messengers, or singers. They appear mute, yet a muffled melody rises from their entrails, a dissonant vibration of basses and stifled voices. Long trumpets recall the Kakaki — oversized instruments used in Hausa royal rituals — extending their breath into the space. The sound of the exhibition emerges intermittently, as if we were suddenly able to hear the inaudible, a kind of animal interference haunting the silence.
Written by Guillaume Blanc-Marianne