“Demeure”

Hodie mihi, cras tibi: today it is me, tomorrow it will be you. Found painted, carved, and engraved on funerary objects and sacred spaces, this memento mori is a reminder of what most of us would prefer to forget: death awaits us all. Yet it could also be understood as an encouragement, or as praise for the even distribution of possibilities. Utter it in an art school or exhibition and the opaque logic of artistic success is immediately softened by the promise that everyone’s turn will come in time; we all share a common fate.

Maybe it is the perspective provided by a shared horizon that makes a cemetery a strangely appropriate setting for an art exhibition. “Demeure” is a group show organized by the artists’ residency space POUSH and held at the Cimetière de Pantin, a vast necropolis located just outside Paris and spread out across kilometers of pathways ranged by hundreds of trees, something rare in the French capital. It presents twenty artists whose works, exhibited in the open air along the Avenue des Sophoras, and creates some touching and even joyful ways of understanding time, disappearance, and longing.

Given the place and the abundance of vegetation and animals, it is not surprising that the most engaging artworks integrate themselves into their surroundings. The effect is a sense of harmony and belonging that matches the extended temporality and natural processes of a cemetery. Such is the case with three works, installed close to one another, by three young women artists of particular interest in the current French scene: Bianca Bondi’s wood piece Midway (night guide) (2023), Tilhenn Klapper’s hanging sculptures Shapeshifters, vol. I (2025), and Valentine Prissette’s textile environment Soaked in aromatic baths (2026).

Bondi lays an old door made of thick, heavy, burned beams on the ground in such a way as to imply it has been there since time immemorial. Elegantly inscribed with talismanic gold symbols inspired by the motifs of Arabic doors (circles, dots, moons, lines), the door suggests an entry to an underground world. It contrasts with the enclosed logic of the cemetery’s tombstones, proposing a gentler and less dogmatic understanding of the afterlife.

Suspended from a nearby tree inside translucid, soft, black polyamide membranes like long stockings, Klapper’s series of wooden bats resemble upside-down totems. Their apotropaic appearance is fitting to both the rich ecology of the cemetery, which hosts a significant number of feral and wild animal species, and to the memories and mysteries of the bodies contained within it. Prissette, meanwhile, sewed together old sheets and dyed them using recycled water and natural pigments, creating loose washes of bright, organic colors arranged in gestural stains, botanical forms, and weather-like traces. This monumental painterly assemblage, installed around a large tree, softens the distinctions between abstraction and landscape, nature and painting, studio and forest. Soaked in aromatic baths also proposes death as transformation, a process of becoming other that assumes cosmic possibilities, full of iridescent light and color.

Expressing a similarly poetic understanding of death, Eric Stephany’s elegant Diving board (Ode to youth) (2026) is a discreet sculpture made of metal railings taken from buildings in Athens, where the artist lives. Assembled together, the railings reproduce the diving platform of the famous Paestum frescoed tomb, The Tomb of the Diver, from the fifth century BCE, which depicts a lone diver leaping into the water. In our own moment of radical uncertainty, this image of an individual jumping into the unknown is powerful.

It also, with its allusion to death as reconciliation with the natural world, calls for the reconsideration of animist and interspecies worldviews and forms of coexistence. Max Fouchy’s Coucou and Mimétismes (both 2026) consist of subtle interventions on stones and tree branches, which he dots with human eyes and fingers. Moving through the cemetery, we feel observed by alluring presences that open a path for stories to be told, bringing together longing, fantasy, and ecology, and inviting us to consider that the body we inhabit is both human and animal, vegetal and mineral. In this sense, hodie mihi, cras tibi becomes an invitation for a deeper continuity between forms of life, matter, and memory: today me, tomorrow you, and always, perhaps, something of one within the other.