Réverbère

“Lights against dark street corners, against hedges, in dark clubs, against accumulation in alleyways. Dirt collects where there are no eyes. And, opened to the light, society finds these areas repulsive […] And so control must expose everything to its certifying daylight, light.”

Like infrastructures of illumination, ghosts too participate in a cycle of erasure, reappearance, and transmission. Avery H. Gordon suggests that they both record and incite. I would add that they also reflect: their pranks and mischievous tricks are reflections of the turbulence of society, the cracks we turn away from—only to circle back and confront them again, as though caught in an endless cycle of historical amnesia. This impulse evokes the movement of a lighthouse: a spectral structure that disappears into the night until its beam sweeps the darkness once more, in a loop—not only to guide, but also to expand human presence into otherwise hostile territories.

It is from this figure—at once luminous, guiding, and complicit—that Lucille Leger and Jacques-Marie Ligot develop their research. The lighthouse becomes a point of convergence, a crossroads for reflection on use and users, on wakefulness and sleep, on night and day, on the gaze and surveillance, on presences and ghosts. The latter should not be understood here as supernatural entities or nuisances, but as metaphors for all that persists in the invisible, becoming a prism through which to grasp how our spaces are traversed by absences, erased histories and affect.

Here, neon lights flicker, revealing networks of cables and objects within the walls.  Discs turn in rhythm with the humidity. Clocks twirl, stuck in a perpetual pirouette. Sensors record data—the passersby in the street, the variations in humidity inside the space, the sounds from outside—and translate them into a spectral score. What once belonged to a logic of surveillance becomes here another form of looking: not one that controls, but one that reveals.

Lucille and Jacques-Marie invite us to see differently. Yet the apparitions they summon are to be perceived less as hauntings than as reminders of concrete reality. Beatriz Colomina writes that modernist architecture—one intrinsically masculine—is not simply a platform welcoming subjects, but rather a mechanism of vision producing those subjects, framing occupants through the placement of windows and the use of glass, enabling a certain voyeurism. “The etymology of the word window reveals that it combines wind and eye,” she reminds us.

In contrast with an architecture that spatializes the questions of objectification, Lucille and Jacques-Marie have imagined a split wall, opening the possibility of a fragmented, airy gaze. Lenses scatter across the partition, dispersing in turn the objects of the gaze, while ventilation systems reinforce the notion of circulation, moving away from a static and virile vision of architecture and the built environment. The users of the space are no longer trapped in viewing machines, but become elusive, furtive presences.

The materials themselves contribute to this fragility: cardboard, invisible ink, fabric. They evoke both the materiality and speculative quality of a model: in their provisional quality, and in their hypothetical nature. “Model (architecture) = body that goes beyond itself,” I once wrote in my student notes. The installation can thus be read as such: an entity that extends on another scale and translates a revision of space. And the precariousness of the materials employed gives it a porous skin, traversed by histories—the fissures become scars, curtains become eyelids, mold becomes a rash. Bandages are replaced by tracing paper that holds together this fragile creature. In this way, they question the fragility of structural systems, the constraining function of the built environment, and propose a reversed reflection of the latter, one elaborated from bodies.

Lucille and Jacques-Marie invite us to see differently, and to look elsewhere. In the basement, another spectre surveilles: a streetlamp with two bulbs, envelopped in a membrane. Its two lights murmur, translating the sounds of the street into a shifting glow, before freeing themselves from the urban context they were destined for, in a gesture of apparent insubordination. They whisper to each other, as if sharing a secret conversation, no longer at our service, producing a luminous language of their own. Behind this intimate scene lies a political memory: that of public lighting, the mechanization of the night, the birth of a surveillance society. This streetlamp, once installed in the streets of Clermont-Ferrand, becomes a character, a reminder of a nocturnal past.

In this way, the devices Lucille and Jacques-Marie conjure do more than persist—they act, through their mischievous tricks, as mirrors, reflecting the cracks, desires, and silences of the spaces they inhabit. Here, the mischief of ghosts can be understood as an archive of pitfalls—grief, desire, frustration—that may become forms of knowledge to be welcomed, to be absorbed. For this, one must listen to them, letting their stories unfold. The word Réverbère—French for streetlight, title of the exhibition and dissident object—carries within its roots this logic of reflection and resonance: to strike again, to repeat, to reflect, to shine, to send back, to re-emit, to echo. The exhibition thus becomes an instrument of reverberation, restoring residues of presence and flows into space. By attending to these echoes, Lucille and Jacques-Marie learn from ghosts, letting their pranks guide the gaze, fragment perception, and transform both the material environment and our way of inhabiting it.