Nicola L.: When the Earth Turned the Other Way

The exhibition When the Earth Turned the Other Way brings together works by the French artist Nicola L. (1932–2018), born in Morocco, who challenged the boundaries between sculpture, performance, design, film, and lived experience. Working from the 1960s onwards between Paris, Brussels, Ibiza, and later New York, Nicola L.’s practice evolved in dialogue with the political and cultural shifts of the period: feminism, anti-war movements, experimental theatre, Conceptual Art, and new forms of communal living.

“Skin is an obsession for me. The different skins, the sensations, the skin of things. Everything has a skin, it’s life.” This statement by Nicola L., written while developing the installation La Chambre en Fourrure (1970), captures the underlying logic of her artistic practice. For Nicola L., skin was a space of encounter—something shared, inhabited, penetrated, and transformed. Her understanding of skin extends beyond the human body to architecture, objects, environments, and social relations themselves. Throughout her work, bodies recline, merge, disappear into collective structures, or inhabit sculptural forms together. Rejecting monumentality, verticality, and rigid individuality, Nicola L. instead proposed softness, horizontality, and participation as alternative ways of imagining both art and communal life.

The exhibition emphasises the formative years Nicola L. spent in Belgium and France during the late 1960s and 1970s, a period marked by intense experimentation and close collaborations with artists, writers, musicians, and critics across Europe. Belgium occupies a special place within this trajectory. It was in Brussels and Antwerp that many of her iconic works were first exhibited and produced, often with the support of local artists and craftspeople.

Nicola L.’s work consistently resists fixed categories. For her famous Pénétrables, she invited visitors to enter sculptures as though stepping into another skin, collapsing the distinction between artwork and participant. Functional sculptures transformed domestic furniture into anthropomorphic presences: feet became sofas, eyes became lamps, bodies became cabinets and communal spaces. These works destabilise conventional hierarchies between art and design, object and subject, utility and imagination. They also propose an alternative understanding of collectivity—one based on proximity, vulnerability, and shared experience.

A central focus of the exhibition is the performative exploration of the body, situated in the space between the public and the domestic, the individual and the collective, questioning how bodies inhabit social structures. Particular emphasis is placed on her engagement with the female body, approached not as a fixed identity but as a site of transformation and political agency.

The exhibition title originates from a graphic novel Nicola L. began while imprisoned in Beirut in 1969. During this period of isolation and uncertainty, she started drawing a speculative story populated by wandering hands, feet, and fragmented bodies moving through desolate landscapes. The phrase When the Earth Turned the Other Way evokes a world that has lost its sense of direction—politically, emotionally, and physically. It suggests both rupture and possibility: a moment when dominant systems lose stability and other forms of relation begin to emerge.

At the centre of the exhibition stands Red Coat (1970), a communal garment created for eleven participants. The coat was sewn, “baptised” in the sea off Ibiza, and activated during performances across Europe. The work embodies Nicola L.’s vision of art as a shared experience. Describing the project, she wrote: “The Coat would be made out of plastic and would fit like a skin: ‘Same Skin For Everybody.’” The phrase captures the utopian impulse running throughout her oeuvre—a desire to imagine forms of togetherness that exceed social divisions while preserving individuality within the collective body.

When the Earth Turned the Other Way is more than a retrospective. The exhibition proposes Nicola L.’s work as a living proposition for the present: at once playful and radical, intimate and political, grounded in the belief that even the smallest gestures can transform the way we inhabit the world together.

With thanks to the Nicola L. Collection & Archive, Alison Jaques Gallery.