Learning with ghosts
Jacques-Marie Ligot
Jacques-Marie Ligot and Lucille Leger engage in a dialogue around a shared interest in intimate space, gestures, fragile architectures, and the body as a driver of space conception. By focusing on the impact and mobilization of bodies within spaces, they both seek to examine the frictions between the material world and the flows that activate it.
Leger's installations are attempts to hybridize domestic space, the organic world, and the art space. She studies the material arrangements that condition the use of spaces. Her sculptures combine elements of furniture with plant, animal, and human forms, exploring the possibilities of the materials she appropriates and their relationship to different contexts of production and representation of her objects. Her work has been exhibited at the Fondation Pernod Ricard and at Treize in 2023, as well as at the Galerie Myriam Chair in Paris and at Collegium Artistique in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2024. She co-founded the art space "Domestic Cults at Scale" in Nantes and is part of the "Groupe Liaison Concrète."
Ligot interrogates his discipline by studying gestures, with particular attention to vernacular and intangible heritages. Working with installations, performances, and editions, his research revolves around three axes: intimate and collective narratives as design tools, disappearance and the invisible as spatial and political structures, and performative gesture to create an architecture of attention.
His work has been presented at the FRAC Île-de-France in 2023, at the BOZAR in Brussels in 2020, at the C.I.V.A in Brussels in 2022, in Nantes (solo show, Domestic Cults, 2022), and at "An Architecture of Necessity" in Sweden in 2019. He was a laureate of the Ateliers Médicis in 2020 and of the FORTE program with his project "Atlas of Gestures" in 2022. He also created the "Uncomfortable Workshop" at ENSA St-Étienne since 2022 and co-directs the Rencontres (talks) in Paris.
“Learning from ghosts” is a research project with the specificity of creating and sharing a framework exploring the notion of ghosts in architecture. We aim to conduct this residency in response to the work of the Italian architect Franco Raggi, who was interested in “the conceptual and physical superimposition of the useful and the useless, the stable and the nomadic, the hard and the soft, the norm and its violation.”
Far from being insignificant, the tent embodies an architecture of the moment, of urgency (which sometimes becomes perennial), reacting immediately to its environment. It is a pocket architecture, one that is collectively patched up, ritually deployed, built like choreography, and worn like clothing.
Building upon our respective practices as architect and artist, this research imagines itself as an inventory of objects exploring invisible aspects of architecture, such as gestures and arrangements that form networks that are invisible yet tangible.
The ghost is an active entity but only materializes through indirect means. We aim to mobilize this concept to question the agency of spaces experienced through affects. How do certain architectures reflect modes of existence, power dynamics, the organization of space, and bodies? Summoning ghosts is therefore about questioning the unspeakable, what architecture and objects do not show us but what shows through them. The tent is a form of quasi-organic architecture that echoes the internal organization of the body and its connection with the “outside.”
We wish to create tent-like installations that we will use means to invite participants (artists, architects, thinkers, writers, musicians) to share their experiences of “ghosts ”. The tent will be used a thinking material as well as an exhibition and hosting space. Throughout various events like exhibitions, workshops and discussions, we will gather an atlas of references around ghosts, bodies and architectures that we will use to make an edition.
