Anja Ripoll

Quagmire Lamprey

Image © Baptiste Coulon

At the top, a perched cabin, extinguished by a new nature, becomes the delicate ballet of a metamorphosis. The fragmented building, once rigid, dances with a proliferating nature. This piece celebrates the fleeting union between man and nature, where each branch and foliage composes an ephemeral symphony, recalling the beauty of our coexistence in the landscape.

A trained ceramist, Anja Ripoll constantly reinvents her approach to the said medium and to the earth out of cultural concern, out of curiosity and above all as a practical tool.

Let’s look at the body of work and mandates to understand what work and what issues we are talking about here. These are fantastic creatures, golems-totems, fusions of ancient, contemporary and “alien” forms, vestiges erected as a cup, vase, receptacle.
A parasitized sun, a cerberus, a castle. As a young contemporary artist from Geneva, at the crossroads of Europe and the capitalist world, her nostalgic sensitivity and the formal speculation that results from it go without saying.

It is about expressing and making singular meaning, digesting the idea of the Anthropocene as it appears to us more and more, uncanned, ingested, vomited and redirected, uncanny, strange. Like the idea of beauty and death, the infinite void and the shaped object are here in fascinated tension. An era in itself and in this way a paradigm escaping our common, cultural and linear sense, the common thread of History.

At a time when the material world would like to be exponential governed by the Leviathan called growth, chained by giants who fade away, opaque in their institutional, Olympic immensity; What will we do with the porcelain when we finally meet the elephant in the room? What appearance and life should be given to the chimeras, titans and other inhabitants of the museum in the event of an emergency?

(Text written by Sherian Mohammed Foster)