Bétonsalon presents Primordial Soup, a solo exhibition by Tiphaine Calmettes curated by Émilie Renard, co-produced by AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, in partnership with d.c.a, asso­cia­tion fran­çaise de déve­lop­pe­ment des cen­tres d’art contem­po­rain. Tiphaine Calmettes is the winner of the 2020 AWARE Prize.

Tiphaine Calmettes cre­ates a new series of sculp­tures that allow you to sit down to taste a drop of kom­bucha, drink a flower tea kept warm in a gar­goyle’s stomach, help your­self to broth from a hollow amidst bread crusts, smell the warm redo­lence of all this cuisine, follow trickles of water as they dribble out of a mon­ster’s mouth, observe ochre light fil­tered through a dried kom­bucha starter, feel the earthy cav­i­ties of the sur­faces around….

These sculp­tures are assem­blages of pre­vious expe­ri­ences, works or rejects that have not com­pleted their meta­mor­phosis: under their own inertia and due to wear and tear, some mate­rials give way under their own weight, or seep, crack or evap­o­rate as they are sen­si­tive to heat. All of them are doomed to be fur­ther trans­formed after the exhi­bi­tion. Whether shaped by skilful hands or left in their ini­tial state, they undergo invol­un­tary trans­for­ma­tions on their own. These ver­sa­tile shapes have not only ingested the var­ious strata of the artist’s work, they have also expe­ri­enced motifs from dis­tant periods–anthro­po­mor­phic uten­sils, stony plants, ani­mals with pouring lips… –an entire mon­strous bes­tiary drawn from a sort of imag­i­nary nat­ural his­tory.

“Primordial soup” is a term asso­ci­ated with a sci­en­tific theory that says that life on Earth is the result of spon­ta­neous gen­er­a­tion within a milieu warm and sticky enough to allow life to arise. A whole ecosystem sus­tains itself in this pri­mor­dial soup. These sen­sory sculp­tures that seem to have emerged from a troglodyte kitchen, turn Bétonsalon into an inhab­it­able place. Thanks to them, Bétonsalon set­tles into a sort of tel­luric domes­ticity.