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Project_Xénia Lucie Laffely is working on a series of textile works exploring the materialisation of images as a strategy of resistance against digital (in)visibility and erasure policies (scheduled deletion, shadowbans, etc.). For several years now, the artist has been working on issues surrounding the acceleration of image consumption, such as the images that scroll endlessly through our Instagram Stories, for example. This rapid pace exceeds our ability to retain them, and these snippets of life either disappear after 24 hours or are cannibalized by artificial intelligence. In her practice, Xénia Lucie Laffely searches for material and sentimental strategies offering an alternative to our digital archives—an embodied finitude outside the digital world. Recently, she has been investigating the visual and textual strategies employed by certain queer and politically engaged accounts to “trick” algorithms and avoid the “shadowbanning” of their content. By posting selfies, pictures of animals, or by combining certain terms, these accounts play with algorithmic norms to share critical content.
In response to these visibility policies, Xénia Lucie Laffely began archiving these images of tension. The artist works from these images (with the consent of the people involved) as a basis for her textile pieces. These compositions are then materialized into her textile works. By extracting these fragments from the digital world and giving them a physical form, Xénia Lucie Laffely develops the idea of an ornamental language of camouflage. Inspired by a “camp” and “glitchy” aesthetic, the density of textures, volumes, and details allows for a slower reading of the images. This excess of materiality becomes a form of resistance, rendering these images indigestible to the digital world.
Bio_Xénia Lucie Laffely (born in Switzerland, lives and works in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal) is completing a Master’s degree in Studio Arts at Concordia University. She holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in textile design from the Geneva University of Art and Design. Her work has been shown at Hugues Charbonneau Gallery (Montreal), Bradley Ertaskiran Gallery (Montreal), Eastern Edge Gallery (St. John’s), Kunstraum Niederoesterreich (Vienna), the Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam), the Centre National d’Art Graphique Le Signe (Chaumont), and Galerie Last Tango (Zurich), amongst others. She was awarded the Swiss Design Award (2019) and was a finalist for the Swiss Art Award (2020).
Approach_Through her artistic practice, Xénia Lucie Laffely explores, in an ambiguous and sentimental way, the notions of domestic space, digital culture, vanity, failure, consumerism, and sapphic narratives. By blending artisanal techniques with digital aesthetics, she places materials at the heart of the process: textiles, metal, wood, and plastic thus form an intuitive visual language. She creates ambiguous objects or spaces that exist somewhere between function and fiction. Through this approach, she explores the potential for an intimate dialogue between the artwork and the viewer. Her imagery, drawn from autofiction, blends intimate stories, popular references, and invented memories. Both familiar and unsettling, the narratives she weaves give tangible form to personal and collective histories in a visceral way, blurring the lines between authenticity and hallucination.
