Sec & Metallic - Exhibitions

Emanuela Campoli is pleased to announce the opening of Sec & Metallic at 48, Foro Buonaparte.

Conceived as a living space, the apartment at 48, Foro Bonaparte presents a carte blanche given to French artist Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann where she explores the status of the home both as a location for art and as a construct of the power relations that define intimacy.

Badaut Haussmann creates an installation specifically thought for the apartment, in the form of a garçonnière. Usually associated with male sexual encounters, this connotated setting also conveys an unapologetic lifestyle that embraces habits that fall outside of gender expectations.

Pursuing her research on feminist architecture, Badaut Haussmann builds an environment of contrasts exploring traditional oppositions such as male-female, container-content and art-decoration, surrounding herself with works from artists such as Liz Deschenes, Reena Spaulings, Cinzia Ruggeri, Eileen Quinlan, Jutta Koether, Emily Sundblad and Pierre Klossowski that expand these interests.

Dualisms and stories of control and freedom greatly inform Badaut Haussmann’s work and are here reinterpreted through the lens of two films that are recurrent in the artist’s practice: Maîtresse by Barbet Schroeder (1976), and its dualistic portrayal of bourgeois décor and BDSM dungeons, and Safe by Todd Haynes (1995), that depicts the house through the imagery of isolation and despair opposed to that of social frames. Cinema is less used here for its narrative potential than as a means of perceiving space and the mechanisms of power involved in architectural forms.

Sec & Metallic will evolve into different configurations over its six-month duration. Tarot readings will take place intermittently, opening the possibility of open-ended experiences, and integrating the future as a dimension of the exhibition.