Villa Arson is pleased to announce the participation of four artists who graduated from the school in the Bullshit Job exhibition presented at the Centre Wallonie Bruxelles on the occasion of the fifth edition of LABOS_DEMOS.
On the initiative of Stéphanie Pécourt, LABOS_DEMOS was developed in 2019 for the benefit of literature outside the book and the visual arts. This initiative aims to promote as yet unidentified and emerging artistic talents in order to highlight both the distinctive features of Belgian and French art school programs and their interconnection at a time when artistic careers are becoming increasingly international.
Curated by Andy Rankin and Manon Klein, this edition brings together some thirty artists from French and Belgian art schools, including several graduates of Villa Arson, around a critical reflection on our relationship to capitalism, productivity, and the value of labor in creation.
artists of the Villa Arson
Clémentine Blaison VanDenHende
Graduated from Villa Arson in 2023, Clémentine Blaison VanDenHende presents 9 to 6, an office chair hybridized with a rat.
It is adorned with large ears and a long, flexible tail, made from neckties. The work takes the form of a grotesque hybrid body, a sort of mutant office animal, somewhere between a corporate mascot and an exhausted creature of the service industry.
In its first version, entitled 9 to 5, this work was based on a dismantled gaming chair, a relic of leisure converted into a tool for productivity. For the exhibition at the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles, the work has been reconfigured from the remains: the symbolic organs (ears, tail) have been reassembled, modified, and adapted to one of the rental chairs provided for the exhibition. This new version highlights the malleability of bodies and identities in contemporary work environments.
9 to 5 and 9 to 6 talk about soft domination, social performativity, and the absurdity of the corporate world. Behind its composite form lies a critique of the alienation and sedentary roots imposed on us by bureaucracy.
Élie Bolard
With WER4, Élie Bolard (Villa Arson 2023) imagine a fictional warehouse made up of so-called “smart” boxes.
Locked away in boxes, former Amazon workers share their experiences at the company and what led them to be locked away in their boxes.
WER4 is a fictional warehouse consisting exclusively of these so-called smart boxes. As the company is already adept at automation technologies, it encourages workers to submit to the pace of the machine. In this warehouse, those who fail to keep up find themselves welded to the machine and their smart packages.
WER4 proposes to rethink our relationship with consumption in the age of e-commerce. It does not blame consumers or employees, but rather the systems that enable the deployment of these controversial technologies, which proletarianize the entire chain, from production to purchase. The installation places humans at the center of a desire to obscure its workers, insofar as the company imagines itself operating in a few years’ time in an entirely robotized and automated manner.
Évangéline Font
Évangéline Font (Villa Arson 2023) deploys a universe tinged with feminist science fiction and craftsmanship.
“In Evangeline Font’s artistic work, artisanal techniques blend with those of traditional sculpture to create a universe tinged with resolutely feminist science fiction. Through drawing, textiles, sculpture, and video, she evokes an imaginary world in which the grand narratives that shape our view of the future invent new frameworks that are less technology-driven and more conscious of living things. Her works draw on utopian architecture and urban and domestic spaces. They often play with modularity to create immersive environments.
Her installation I Arrived Carrying This Wonderful Heavy Bag Full of Stuff makes direct reference to science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin. In her essay “The Theory of the Basket,” which itself draws on the work of feminist author Elizabeth Fisher, she advocates for narratives without violence or individual heroism, favoring stories of gathering and beginnings rather than hunting and death. Here, on a concrete shelf, Évangeline Font presents a series of sculptures, smells, and living processes. She creates a polyphonic and evolving ensemble in which all the elements carry a fragment of a common story. Each exhibition gives rise to new arrangements based on research into a material, a technique, a form. The work can be understood as a basket that fills with constantly renewed experiences.” Guillaume Mansart
Reem Hasanin
In Meeting Point, Reem Hasanin (Villa Arson 2025) misuses airport signage to reveal its political significance.
Meeting point takes the form of a fake airport sign, replicating the visual codes and institutional signage found in international transit areas. It is part of a reflection on the logic of circulation, control, and hierarchization of bodies on a global scale. Whereas airports are generally perceived as neutral non-places, mere transit spaces, the work highlights their political significance as spaces of sorting and filtering, theaters of unequal mobility.
By addressing contemporary forms of work, these four artists explore, each in their own way, the tensions between productivity, precariousness, and the collective imagination.
Their participation in Bullshit Job demonstrates the diversity and critical engagement of young artists trained in Nice.
Practical information
November 14 to December 4, 2025
Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles
Galerie, 127-129 rue Saint Martin, Paris 4
Free admission Monday to Saturday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.