Everything not saved will be lost

01–15.08.2024
La Fonda,
Biarritz (FR)

Curation: La Fonda 
Text: Marie Catalano
Photo: Juantxo Egana

Hanna Rochereau’s Everything not saved will be lost at La Fonda was inspired in part by its unconventional setting: an ornate interior in the seaside town of Biarritz that was previously the showroom and studio of Gabrielle Chanel. The designer first opened her haute couture house on the road to the beach in 1915, when droves of European aristocrats flocked to their summer homes to wait out World War 1. Above her conspicuous storefront, Chanel’s private room served as both parlor for receiving glamorous clientele on holiday from busy metropolis living, and production site for creating their custom-tailored ensembles. Between her nearby factory where her designs were produced and the downstairs shop where they were displayed and sold, the room upstairs operated according to a slower kind of time towards different ends: the production of carefully crafted, one-of-a-kind garments for specific bodies.

Rochereau’s work derives from her observations of these architectures, apparatuses, and chronologies in which fashion and consumer products circulate. Her paintings and sculptures often contain visual display mechanisms: the expanse of a vacant sign board; the tiered structure of an empty display case. In Chanel’s former salon, Rochereau turns her attention away from the glamor of the boutique display to the underside of fashion production: archives and storage rooms, and, in particular, the ubiquitous cardboard box. With these subjects, she explores the tension between fast consumption and sites of conservation and preservation, or what Donna Haraway has referred to as “productions of permanence.”¹ 

Using the museum as an example, Haraway suggests that productions of permanence developed as a societal reflex to stave off decadence and biological decay. In Rochereau’s show, a series of paintings on view flatly reproduce the organizational facets of archival spaces: rooms piled high with cardboard boxes or a hallway of drawers. Their arrangement among the room’s decorative woodwork and built-in shelving lends them an architectural function, like windows into the storage rooms visitors were never meant to see. On the floor, labeless cardboard boxes are organized into neatly tiered geometric displays, like the set of a surrealist unboxing video that takes place in an Amazon warehouse-turned-fashion boutique. Are they filled with Chanel bags or fidget spinners? In contrast to the practical spaces of the paintings, Rochereau’s sculptures bear decorative flourishes that speak the language of desire even as their material is unremarkable and mass produced.

Boxes are the first thing we interact with after we’ve purchased a product, and they are also what we use when putting something away into storage. In contrast to the whiplash of fashion cycles, ‘productions of permanence’ separate objects from their use-value and cement them into the historical record. Rochereau’s sculptures set the slow intimacy of a former couture house against the speed and decadence of shopping in the age of the internet, while the paintings slow the time of the production line to a halt in the storage room. But how do we decide what to keep there? Rochereau has gotten rid of all of it, save for the boxes themselves.