January 2025
Frédéric Maillard
Geneva, Switzerland
Chambres à air: Heidi Bucher & Marie Hazard
What is the composition of the walls that border our soul?
This seems to be the question posed, a few years – a few temporal layers – apart, by Heidi Bucher and Marie Hazard, whose working bodies uncover memories in the interstices of the skin.The work of these two artists converges through multiple interweavings, where fabric, both composed and composing, unfurls its threads in the corridors of memory. These corridors traverse a house made of gas (gauze) walls, walls no longer anchored to a ground that, horizontal, waits to be paved by our uncertain steps. The rooms in this house float on the wind and quiver with the pearls. They exist in chrysalis, filled with a new air. These new spaces move, travel, anchored by two feet, pillars and roots, wrapped in protective meshes. The drawers are open, clear, honest, now coated with a pearlescent layer of renewal.
Bucher and Hazard, in the uniqueness of their approaches, offer a recomposition of memory. Bucher, through her skinnings, strips away the layers of memory and determinism in an intimate yet political gesture, reclaiming and traversing spaces laden with constraints, walls themselves trapped by injunctions and old truths. Sometimes, a pearlescent layer appears, iridescent, like a varnish of the present. Hazard, meanwhile, lays images of memory, both personal and collective, not only onto her weavings through sublimation but also more ethereally, into the air that flows through the beads of her installations. She creates temporal landscapes through threads, offering as many windows into the awakening of words and their possibilities. Bucher and Hazard thus respond to each other to create new architectures of thought – desired, chosen, and solid.
The materials that compose them are crucial. Bucher, through her choice of latex, initiates a discussion about the durability of the material and, inevitably, the memories it carries. The skin of the wooden floor in the Obermülhe house also crumbles with time, with the people who encounter and recount it, revealing the gauze—a unifying fabric—as if to show us its structure before the ultimate flight into oblivion. This continuity of material is questioned by Hazard through the materials she selects, such as the repurposed inner tubes she collects, grants a place to, and unites with copper threads. In this way, the blurred contours between public skin and private skin—the one we shed and the one we compose—begin to dance. Time is transient, and the task lies in capturing the ephemeral, embracing its fleeting beauty and the threads it weaves in its wake.
The body is questioned—in its strength and fragility, its permeability and trust. At the heart: gestures. Hazard bends to the rhythm of Indestructible—her loom—carrying, pulling, sliding, and caressing. Bucher applies and tears away, then dresses herself. The body is at work, enduring these gestures; it is shaped by effort and discovers its limits. Yet, it always finds its place. For Bucher, there was Borg, her studio in a former butcher shop in Zurich—a place of retreat and protection, whose walls were the first to be translated into latex. Another essential shell: clothing, a subject she studied as a young woman. Underwear, reclaimed by both artists, represents an inter-skin, standing as a feminist assertion of the private—like other walls that touch women’s bodies. Through these gestures and assertions, they inscribe themselves into a rhizomatic genealogy of artists, of women who become witnesses to a chosen past and pillars of a reconstructed present.
Bucher and Hazard seem to come together to create a vessel, with floating undulations and a gauzy materiality, where memories and present moments stir. Ultimately, they bring us back to our bodies, conscious of what composes them and of their unique forms, yet connected to a solid and joyful whole—rooted in the present and its future memory.
Lorraine de Thibault
