28.08 -30.08.2026
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Friday, August 28, 2026
Fair Dates
Saturday, August 29 – Sunday, August 30, 2026
Opening Hours: 14:00 – 20:00
Tout doit disparaître
Veronika Desova, Slava George, Elvire Ménétrier
@Art-o-Rama, Marseille
Tout doit disparaître brings together works by Elvire Ménétrier, Veronika Desova, and Slava George around two products — soap and rose oil— rooted in ancestral forms of craftsmanship that are now undergoing widespread industrialization. Emerging from artisanal traditions deeply embedded in their respective territories — Marseille’s soap-making tradition and Bulgaria’s Valley of Roses — these materials serve as starting points for a reflection on the relationships between the body, industry, and material memory.
So what is it that has to disappear? The body, the old body that is, for it to appear a new body, a renewed body, the body of the past, that undergoes metamorphosis.
It all starts with Athena. Athena was, in a way, an unwanted child. Zeus did not want any more children, sons in particular, for his paranoia about being defeated or overrun. Once, Zeus lay with Metis (1) and then regretted it immediately after - the god of all gods was frightened by a prophecy that Metis would bear a son more powerful than him. Now pregnant with Athena, Metis was forcefully transformed into a fly and consequently swallowed by her lover to prevent the birth of their child. But an Oceanid is a sage, a witch, a woman. She does not rest without work. Inside Zeus’ body, Metis created an armor for her daughter, who at the time resided in her father's head, giving him insufferable headaches, as daughters do. When the time came, Athena was born, emerging from Zeus's head, all grown-up and in full gear.
In the myth of Zeus, a god, but also a man, swallowing and birthing, Elvire recognizes ideologies of the technological revolution, and one in particular: genesis by oneself, procreation via man, a metaphorical (or not) outside-of-woman-womb. Here, she explores the concept of technical autophagy - where a system evolves by devouring its own source - artificial intelligence is an example of such. But then, in this perfect symbiosis, something happens - jaded with its own body and the ever-renewing versions of it, the machine fails, becomes a zombie - “a model collapse”. Human bodies are devoured by modern technology in a spectacular way - biometrics, targeting, surveillance - becoming other, symbolic bodies (2). Digital, weightless, bodiless bodies are easier to consume, spit, multiply.
Elvire’s works - a soap kinetic sculpture documenting episodes of Metis’ journey, also developed within a small-scale series of images, crafted from surgical silicone and embedded in computer motherboards, and a painting of a throat with an aluminum hyoid bone (3), an obkov (4) - explore different stages of these cyborgian processes. Special attention is given to the gentle forces of resistance - what remains, what gets stuck, what continues to speak from within the body that has swallowed it.
“...and from his crown Athena sprang up, clad in her armor.” (5)
On two of the greaves from Golayama Kosmatka tumulus, an ancient funeral complex in the Rose Valley in Bulgaria, rests the face of Athena - as the Thracian counterpart of the Great Mother Goddess (6). This exact tomb is the source of inspiration for Veronika Desova and Slava George. The works reinterpret funerary symbolism, personal adornment, and defensive armor to imagine the ritual burial of a contemporary Thracian woman through a futuristic, technological lens. They also serve as a proposition for functional armor, adapted to her needs and desires, thus encompassing the whole of her life cycle, both here and in the afterlife.
Cast fragments of both artists' bodies, rendered in metal and glass, are combined with sealed vessels containing rose oil (7) and gold-infused water. Historically valued for their medicinal, ritual and olfactory properties, these liquids function as agents of purification and protection. Encased within the sculptures, they reference the enduring Bulgarian practice of protiv uroki (protection against the evil eye), extending ancient burial traditions into speculative contemporary mythology. The objects take care of the body disappearing and the body disappeared - in Thracian tombs, pieces of armor often indicated the position of corporeal parts, especially if the corpse of the one buried was missing. In doing so, they replace the ephemeral human body, becoming a symbol of a body ancient, body immortal.
Beyond industry, the show weaves a web of mythological connections—from the legend of Athena’s birth from Zeus's head to artifacts found in Thracian tombs in Bulgaria. The works inhabit their own temporality, in which archaic mythological imagery is interwoven with futuristic narrative, creating a complex vision of emancipation via technology, grounded in deep historicity.
(1) ancient Greek Titan goddess of wisdom, an Oceanid
(2)Groys, Boris. Philosophy of Care. London and New York: Verso, 2022.
(3)a small, horseshoe-shaped bone in the upper neck that does not connect to any other bone in the body, the one responsible for swallowing and speaking
(4)thin metal covers protecting icons in Orthodox iconography
(5)The Library or Bibliotheca, Pseudo-Apollodorus
(6)Dimitrova, Diana. 2015. The Tomb of King Seuthes III in Golyama Kosmatka Tumul Sofia: Arros.
(7) Bulgaria is the world’s biggest producer and exporter of rose oil, centered in the so called Rose Valley - the provenance of the oil in the pieces in the show
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Veronika Desova is an architect, educator and conceptual artist based between New York, USA and Sofia, Bulgaria. Her interdisciplinary practice examines the relationship between architecture and the female body through sculpture, installation, textiles, photography, performance and industrial fabrication. Working with architectural fragments, constructed environments and responsive materials, she explores how bodies inhabit, negotiate and remember space. Her work engages with tension, permeability, temporality and transformation, often creating unstable encounters between architectural structures and the physical body.
Slava George is a Sofia and Mexico City based multidisciplinary artist who works with various media - installation art, sculpture, performance, video, photography and conceptual fashion design. Her artistic position is deeply connected to the role of women and the feminine as a social construct. In her artistic research, she seeks the connections between social phenomena such as alchemy, myths and rituals, and specifically, how they are intertwined within the collective subconscious and the human condition.
Elvire Ménétrier (1994) has lived and worked in Marseille since 2019. A graduate of Villa Arson (Nice, 2018) following her training at the Conservatoire in Paris, she has developed an interdisciplinary practice (painting, sculpture, installation, sound) in which the body is treated as an unstable archive, permeated by technical traces and intimate memories. She is a co-founder of the Panthera collective and a recipient of the Ateliers de la Ville de Marseille grant, where she currently works.
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