Carla Adra – Ça te colle à la peau (Face A), 2023

In Ça te colle à la peau (“It Sticks to Your Skin”), Carla Adra moves through a glowing red landscape as a succession of figures: a cowgirl, a handywoman, an architect and a woman smoking shisha. Drawing on research into the successive uses of Mécènes du Sud’s building in Montpellier, where the work was first shown, she embodies roles associated with the building’s former lives. Clothes, tools and gestures make each occupation legible, while the polish and rhythm of a music video turn labour into choreography, loosening familiar stereotypes through humour and erotic charge. The French expression “coller à la peau” describes something that clings to a person – a scent, a past or a reputation. Here, histories adhere equally to bodies and buildings, carried by those who work within them. A recurring song gives that persistence a physical, insistent form.

Listening lies at the core of Carla Adra’s practice, which unfolds across performance, installation, video, drawing and writing. Her works embody and convey intimate stories that the artist gathers, making space for narratives that have remained unseen, as well as for voices and forms of speech that have been overlooked or silenced. Lending her body and voice to the stories of others, the artist transforms her works into vessels for multiple identities. Through this process of exchange, she shifts the sites of enunciation and embodiment.