Wilfrid Almendra, Adelaïde. Installation view at Panorama, Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille and Frac Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur (2022). Photos: Aurélien Mole. Courtesy of Adagp, Paris
An immersive installation across two exhibition spaces featuring radio transmissions, rubble, and a series of sculptural elements made of stone, copper, aluminium, glass and peacock feathers, combined found and repurposed materials into a reflection of being and belonging in flux, circulation, and transformation.
Adelaïde was an invocation to lives lived between territories. The name speaks to a vernacular for migration and metamorphosis: of the human experience of movement across transnational boundaries as well as the processes that transform industrial remains, textile, feathers, stone, aluminium, plastic, and copper through histories of use and exchange.
The poetics of dialogue in Almendra’s practice resides in making apparent divisions visible by creating continued landscapes of material and narrative connections that capture the viewer’s imagination. A fragile, immersive installation that questions the monumentality of the common and ordinary, Adelaïde opened a space of thinking, sensing, feeling, and knowing life without separation, discrimination, or division. It questioned the porosity of narratives, objects, and structures while revealing the arts of the working class as an act of ecological consciousness and alternative economy built on generosity and exchange.
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