Sleeping duty
Michel Jocaille's solo show

Sleeping duty explores the tensions between rest and labor through an installation combining sculpture and textile. Here, rest does not appear as a withdrawal from activity, but rather as a state permeated by persistent logics of production. Drawing on the history of the canuts—the silk workers of Lyon—Michel Jocaille evokes a working-class memory in which repetitive gestures shape both time and bodies, while the textile medium introduces a slower temporality, one that stands in contrast to the demands of productivity and efficiency.

Figures from popular imagination, Harlequin and Pierrot embody exposed bodies that are at once desirable and exhausted. Their presence opens up a queer reading attentive to regimes of visibility, performance, and exploitation. The exhibition brings together the memory of labor and minority experiences, envisioning rest as a form of resistance capable of suspending and displacing the mechanisms of production and social assignment.

Born in 1987 in northern France, Michel Jocaille lives and works in Paris.