Laure Prouvost – Hovering Caress Amère, 2022-2026

Enter the belly of a whale. Laure Prouvost’s vast breathing organism hovers above the remains of a dance party, as though it had swum in the wake of a cruise ship and swallowed everything that drifted its way. Seaweed and mud cling to its insides alongside breasts made of glass, cups, bottles, streamers and confetti. People enter too. In Prouvost’s words, each visitor becomes a protagonist, material within a space where everything seems to hold equal value. The stomach absorbs whatever it encounters, drawing bodies and debris, sound and organic matter into the same creature. The title, Hovering Caress Amère, turns this embrace into a complicated love: amère means “bitter”, while echoing mère, “mother” and amare, “to love”. Inside, interdependence becomes playful and sensuous as everything brushes against something else.

The intertwining of narrative, language and sensory experience lies at the core of Laure Prouvost’s practice. Her works are marked by wit, wordplay and unexpected associations. They open passages to alternative temporalities and spaces, prompting shifts in perspective through which questions of kinship, migration, climate change and interspecies relations are reconfigured.