Région Sud Design Prize : Cassandre Thévenier
The first thing ceramicist Andrea Moreno does when she arrives at her Marseille studio is dig through the trash. There she finds her own castoffs: broken pieces, imperfect sculptures, failed firings, scraps of clay, leftover glazes tossed aside without a second thought, waiting for the day inspiration strikes in a different frame of mind. The idea of failure or mistakes doesn’t seem to belong to the Venezuelan artist and designer’s vocabulary. Of course, she designs her objects, imagines them, anticipates them, and works the clay and glazes with all the technical skill she has built up over years of practice — as well as through her training at the Maison de la Céramique in Dieulefit (Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region).
But what ends up in the trash one day will end up on the table the next, because “error,” for her, is only a temporary state, waiting to be put back to use. Her practice draws on what she calls “Venezuelan ingenuity,” or the “resourceful glamour” of her native country — a capacity to build and repair with what already exists, with intelligence and resilience. Trained in illustration at Kingston University in London (UK), the Caracas-born artist gradually redirected her practice toward design, sculpture, and, specifically, ceramics. She moved to Marseille, where her sculptures quickly drew attention for their contrasts of color and texture, the collage techniques she employs, and a body of work that blends the utilitarian with the symbolic.
Assemblage and “zero waste” sit at the heart of her approach: fragments of “past objects” are reborn as new forms, united through recasting and crushing, among other techniques. The starting point for her objects, sculptures, and installations is always a specific memory, whose elements she magnifies until they become “carriers of memory.” The installation she is presenting at Art-o-rama, for instance, is inspired by the Venezuelan estar — a living room not used in everyday life, where the household’s most extravagant objects wait, protected under plastic covers and tarps, for only the most important visits. Her approach aims to be popular and accessible, and the pieces she produces range from candlesticks to sculptural installations, such as Tita (2024) — a hammock made up of around a hundred pieces, exhibited by the 19M at the Mucem — or Carmen Laryssa (2025), a tribute to her aunt, seated in her eternal plastic chair facing the Caribbean Sea, beer in hand.
That same blend of power, humor, and humility runs through Andrea Moreno’s creations — as in the shower shelf fitted with ceramic toothbrushes, which can be read as a still life, where human presence is suggested, where the objects seem inhabited. The works of designer and artist Andrea Moreno are ambivalent, varied, and resist being categorized too quickly. Someone who relishes being surprised by the way matter interacts with the power of a kiln reaching 1250 degrees, she offers us a practice of highly technical, artistically forceful tinkering — one that never loses sight of either her origins or her sense of humor.
by Justinien Tribillon
Cassandre Thévenier, born in Ambilly in 1996, has lived and worked in Marseille since 2019, where she obtained a DNSEP in design in 2025.
Her work originates in intimate narratives, attachments, and spontaneous uses. It weaves itself around our sentimental objects to question what they hold within.
Her practice explores what ordinarily remains discreet: silent gestures, invisible presences, and interior narratives. She questions the boundary between our bodies, our souls, and our objects, how they preserve traces of ourselves and sometimes perpetuate our existences.
It is through experiences of grief that she interrogates these transformations: those moments when certain objects suddenly change status, becoming vessels of memory, spaces of dialogue, or forms of presence. Her work is interested in what objects allow us to reinvent, narrate, or embody in the face of absence.
Cassandre considers possibilities, moments of doubt, and tipping points. Those situations where a gesture, a light, a sound, or an object seems to open a breach in reality and leads us to question the place of the absent in our lives.
In her work, light, gestures, contexts, and narratives become raw materials on the same level as textiles, ceramics, wood, and glass. Her design practice explores the sensitive, intimate, and invisible uses of our objects: the uses that transform, in our eyes, ordinary objects into sacred ones.
Through her pieces, Cassandre Thévenier questions the bonds we weave with objects and how they allow us to confront absence, to reorganise it, and create alongside it. Her work reveals a need for continuity, dialogue, and care through the object.
Each of her works thus attempts to open a passage: between visible and invisible, intimate and shareable, presence and absence.
https://www.instagram.com/cassandre_thevenier/
