sissi club, Marseille

Amalia Laurent’s work combines textile, performative, and sculptural practices in a continual dialogue with landscape and history. Trained in Batik by Mas Tatang in Tembi, Indonesia, she reinvents this traditional technique within a contemporary visual language, where each dyed fabric becomes territory, map, and trace. Wax and dye — rooted in craft and ornament — become tools for telling intertwined stories of family, collective memory, and political history.

Often conceived in situ, her installations transform fabric into structure, skin, filter, or threshold, creating spaces where the visible and invisible coexist. These textile landscapes evoke layered, parallel, or vanished worlds, opening porous zones between architecture and living matter, between bodies and landscapes, between the sacred and the profane.

Amalia Laurent (b. 1992, France) is a French-Indonesian artist based between Paris and Nîmes. She graduated from the Royal College of Art (London, UK) in 2018 and is currently pursuing a PhD in Medieval History at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris, FR). In 2024–2025, she was a resident at the Villa Medici (Rome, IT). Her recent exhibitions include Villa Medici (Rome, IT), Musée de l’Histoire de l’Immigration (Paris, FR), ARCO (Madrid, ES), Anne Barrault (Paris, FR), Sainte-Chapelle (Paris, FR), and Château Lacoste (Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, FR). Her works are held in the collections of the Musée de l’Histoire de l’Immigration (Paris, FR).

Marion Ellena’s photographic practice draws on an archive of images from different moments in time — from photographs taken in her adolescence to those captured by others, including her mother. Working with this material, she explores memory through the experience of exile, embracing its emotional weight.
Deeply tied to darkroom processes, her work challenges the reproducible nature of photography. Through collages, filters, and photograms, she deliberately distorts sharpness to blur reference points and create distance from the original moment. Even with the negative or digital file, she notes, a print can never be exactly the same — the paper may no longer exist, or the chemistry may have aged. This economy of means opens up a field of experimentation, where accidents are welcomed and tamed as elements of her artistic language.

Marion Ellena (b. 1992, Venezuela) is a French-Peruvian photographer based in Marseille. She graduated from La Cambre (Brussels, BE) in 2015 and from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Decoratifs (Paris, FR) in 2017. Recent exhibitions have been held at Jeu de Paume Lab (Paris, FR), Polyptyque (Marseille, FR), Centre Photographique (Marseille, FR), sissi club (Marseille, FR), L’Imagerie — centre d’art (Lannion, FR), club 6c6 (Grenoble, FR). She was the winner of the Résidence 1+2 in 2023 and benefited from the Ecumes programme in 2024.