Residency
Théâtre Domestique in Lanzarote
In Lanzarote, water hardly exists: it must be captured, invented, transformed.
It is from this absence that this project was born.
Within the context of my residency at Hektor in August 2025, I chose to pursue Théâtre Domestique by leaving my objects in a state of deliberate precarity: unfired, fragile, destined to disappear.
These pieces, conceived to contain water but unable to hold it, embody a metaphor for the territory: they speak both of the ingenuity born of scarcity and of the fragility of a common good essential to life.
05
A lesson from Lanzarote
Lanzarote is not an exception, but a mirror. What is at stake here foreshadows other territories. Water scarcity is no longer only insular: it is becoming global.
My three pieces—pitcher, sculptural pitcher, elevated bowl—are not solutions, but signs. They recall this paradox: making vessels for an unattainable water. Carrying the memory of a use while denying its function.
From Lanzarote, I bring back a certainty: fragility is not weakness. It is a truth, even a resource. It forces us to invent, to respect, to share.
It teaches us to think of art not as permanence, but as vigilance.
02
Théâtre Domestique: continuation and shift
Théâtre Domestique was born from a desire: to elevate the object of use, to move it from the everyday into the realm of contemplation. Vases, pitchers, bowls became in my work silent figures, almost theatrical. Actors in an imaginary domestic stage, they embodied a tension between utility and contemplation.
In Lanzarote, this stage has changed. It is barer, harsher, more urgent.
The pieces created—a large traditional pitcher, a sculptural pitcher, an elevated bowl—borrow their forms from the ancestral repertoire of the island. Yet they subvert their function: they do not contain, they testify.
For I chose to leave them unfired.
This refusal of firing is not an accident but a stance: not to fix matter, but to accept its vulnerability. These pieces exist in an unstable state, like the water they evoke. They are made to contain, but never will: water would destroy them, returning them to earth.
Thus, in Lanzarote, Théâtre Domestique shifts. The object is no longer merely an actor of an intimate scene: it becomes a witness to a collective urgency.
04
Water as common good, water as fracture
In Lanzarote, every drop is political.
Once, it depended on collective ingenuity: cisterns, walls, architectures designed to capture the invisible. Today, it depends on desalination plants: costly, energy-intensive, vulnerable. Water is no longer a gift from the sky but an industrial product.
This situation reveals a fracture: what should be shared becomes scarce, controlled, commodified. Water, the common good par excellence, becomes a fragile resource, subject to inequalities and tensions.
Within this context, my pieces take on the value of a warning. Their precarity reflects that of water: both depend on very little, both can disappear. Their crumbling silently says what the island cries out: without water, there is no life, no culture, no future.
03
The cycle of water, the cycle of earth
Every jar is born of a dialogue between earth and water: shaping one to welcome the other. But here, that dialogue is reversed.
My pieces, large and open, seem ready to receive water. Yet they absorb it, crack, dissolve. Water does not fill them, it undoes them.
This cycle tells a simple truth: nothing belongs to us. Neither the earth, nor the water, nor even the object we make. By refusing firing, I leave my pieces in this precarious state that reflects the island’s very condition: a vital resource always in suspension.
Each piece thus becomes a metaphor: fragile like water, yet also subject to its power. For it is water, paradoxically, that holds the strength to annihilate them.
These objects are therefore not fixed forms, but provisional presences. Figures of cycle, where impermanence, return, and transformation are embodied.
01
Lanzarote: an island shaped by scarcity
Lanzarote is an island without rivers, without springs, without groundwater.
Since always, water has been rare here. And this scarcity has shaped the territory as much as the winds or the volcanoes.
Every drop counts. The aljibes—large underground cisterns—collect rain through gently sloping roofs. Low lava walls protect crops from the wind and preserve nocturnal humidity. The black volcanic soil, picón, porous and mineral, captures the dew. Here, farming happens without rain. Life is lived in waiting.
These vernacular gestures embody an intelligence of scarcity: an economy of means, a constant attentiveness, an inventiveness born of necessity.
Today, however, the island depends almost entirely on seawater desalination—a technology costly, fragile, energy-consuming, yet vital. This shift reveals a contemporary tension: how to inhabit a territory where the most essential resource does not exist?
Lanzarote is an island shaped by its absence of water. This lack is not only a climatic fact, but also a collective memory and a political question. And perhaps even, a starting point to rethink our gestures, our forms, our objects.
