Alex Ayed: Totano / Lito Kattou: Soothsayers

The Frac des Pays de la Loire is hosting two summer exhibitions by two international artists focusing around the Mediterranean as a living space between desert and abyss. Alex Ayed (French-Tunisian) presents Totano, approaching his project as a step towards fulfilling a promise made to a Sicilian fisherman and exploring the depths of a sea on which he sails and creates.

Lito Kattou (Cypriot) presents Soothsayers, who come to predict and heal. Three large sculptures representing them, alongside a video linked in real time to temperature fluctuations in Cyprus, invite visitors to reflect on the future of our environment. 

Alex Ayed: Totano
Curated by Claire Staebler

A promise binds the one who makes it to the unknown. By linking the present to an uncertain future, it becomes a form of foundation. To promise is to take responsibility for what does not yet exist.

The Totano exhibition, presented at the Frac des Pays de la Loire, originates in a gesture—a handshake. A pact without contract, committing all that the future holds in terms of uncertainty and trust.

It was during a crossing of the Mediterranean Sea that an encounter with a Sicilian fisherman led to an informal agreement. What began as a simple transaction evolved into a negotiation, and the exchange gradually shifted toward a mutual understanding, without guarantees or clearly defined terms. The promise has to be held, and so it transforms.

By paying attention to the connections forged along the way, to the informal economies negotiated between shores, the artist turns the encounter into an act of creation. The exhibition unfolds, not as the illustration of an anecdote, but as the extension of a process in which the work takes shape through currents and contingencies.

The Totano exhibition brings together a series of works that both preserve the memory of this bond and express a desire to honor it. Here, they become presences, companions, imbued with memory and expectation, bearing within them the traces of a commitment to be upheld—much like votive offerings entrusted to the sea to ward off misfortune or give thanks to the unknown.

Lito Kattou: Soothsayers
Curated by Ludovic Delalande

On the occasion of the exhibition Soothsayers, Lito Kattou presents a body of work comprising three sculptures and a new video installation. The Cypriot artist unfolds a fictional and sensorial universe in which the Soothsayers emerge—enigmatic, nomadic, and trans-temporal figures.

Wandering without fixed origin or destination, these soothsayers appear equipped with utilitarian objects—flowers, compasses, containers, tools—integrated into their garments, and accompanied by fragments of wings and copper feathers scattered across the ground.

Constructed in metal, these life-sized silhouettes form an inhabited landscape in which these entities gather, contemplate, and tend to remnants from migratory species—some endangered, others already vanished. At once symbols of hope, freedom, and spirituality, these fragments evoke both the fragility of living beings and the possibility of repair. Their metallic materiality suggests endurance and continuity.

In counterpoint, the video projection stages a desert landscape traversed by the artist’s digital double—another soothsayer figure. Generated from real-time data, the work unfolds as a fragmented narrative of existence and disappearance, rendering perceptible the ecological and social transformations at play in the Mediterranean region, particularly the growing threat of desertification.

With Soothsayers, Lito Kattou examines the interdependent relationships between humans, non-humans, technology, and the environment. The Soothsayers—at once oracles, guardians, and mediators—embody warning figures in the face of contemporary crises—climatic, political, and historical—while opening up the possibility of reimagined futures. The exhibition thus invites a rethinking of the ties between beings and territories in a world undergoing profound transformation.