within the frame of WHY DOES THE FLAMINGO LOSE ITS COLOR? part of VU.CHUV - Art at the Hospital (Lausanne) in partnership with foodculture days
Installation and video: Avril 5 - June 9, 2025, Espace de la Mercerie, Lausanne
Vernissage/Performance: Saturday Avril 5, 2025 (11h00-18h00, Performance 16h00), Espace Mercerie, Lausanne (followed by an aperitif with the VU.CH team + foodculture days)
Initially trained in interior architecture, Monika Emmanuelle Kazi explores how our bodies are conditioned by living spaces and the elements that surround us.
The artist continues her research by investing in the space of the laundry room, a place often relegated to the periphery of artistic and social narratives, despite its role in crystallizing processes of transformation, rehabilitation, purification, and reassembly.
In A Home Care II, a duo of performers engages in a ritual of mutual care, exploring the emotional weight of routine gestures and their potential resonance beyond the domestic space.
This work extends the artist's research on bodily memory and machine learning systems, questioning how everyday gestures shape our identities and are transmitted as movement repertoires inscribed over time. If machines learn through repetition, so do our bodies. Washing gestures—whether related to laundry, skin, or surfaces—form a living archive, a silent language that testifies to our individual and collective histories.
Through a performative staging, Monika Emmanuelle Kazi weaves connections between self-care and care for others, between intimate memory and historical narratives. By diverting the primary function of the laundry room, A Home Care II transforms this space into a site of interaction and transmission, where dynamics of repair and reappropriation unfold. Far from being a mere place of maintenance, the laundry room becomes a space of rewriting, where each gesture resonates as a committed and poetic act.
Monika Emmanuelle Kazi (*1991) is a Geneva-based artist. She explores manifestations of bodily memory within domestic spaces, focusing on the concept of machine learning. In her artistic practice, she develops organic installations in the form of performative and textual scenographies.
Her recent exhibitions include Mimesis of Domesticity, MASI, Lugano (2024), and Tituba, qui pour nous protéger?, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2024); La cour des grands, Kunsthalle Friart, Fribourg (2022); and Beauté na yo, Villa du Parc, Annemasse (2022).
In 2021, she was awarded the Kiefer Hablitzel Göhner Art Prize.
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WHY DOES THE FLAMINGO LOSE ITS COLOR? part of VU.CHUV - Art at the Hospital (Lausanne) in partnership with foodculture days
"The title echoes the complexity and subtlety of the daily act of eating which, while essential for survival, opens a vast field of exploration into intimacy, identity, and collective living. The four artists reinvent their connection to food, transforming it into materials for creation and reflection."
At the CHUV in Lausanne, 2.1 million meals are served annually, requiring the daily involvement of hundreds of people to ensure logistics and production. However, food is not merely about nourishing the body; it also encompasses social, health, and ecological dimensions.
Four artists explore this theme through the lens of care, using food not just as sustenance but as materials for creation, encounter, and transformation.
- Monika Emmanuelle Kazi, invited by foodculture days, represents the water cycle—life's essential source—to reflect on relationships.
- Maude Schneider’s porcelain industrial food items remind us that dietary habits are constructs shaped by factors such as age, gender, and social status.
- Grace Gloria Denis highlights the invisible labor of institutional kitchens, using memory, cultural identity, and collective work as her mediums.
- Valentin Merle structures the exhibition space by installing repurposed fabrics, previously dyed with plant-based pigments, evoking ecological impact.
A flamingo's plumage is determined by its diet. The title metaphorically suggests how food shapes identity and influences territory. Eating is fundamental to survival, and considering it through the prism of care fosters an ethic based on interdependence: food engages the intimate (self-care), the collective (caring for others), and the environment (caring for ecosystems and living beings).