The house of shit

It stinks to high heaven. The horizon is ochre-colored. The trees have no leaves and ferment in the disgusting, damp stench of the landscape. There is a hill on this swamp. That’s where it stands.
Shoes sink into the rotting excrement. Constant movement is necessary to avoid sinking. Here and there are areas of firmer ground.
Near the house, hidden in the rotten undergrowth, there is a small sticky yellow tent. It is difficult to reach in this tangle of fungus-infested bushes and tree stumps.

Visibility is poor and foggy from the rising rot. The tent is locked. The key is in the door of the house. It is difficult to move. It is soft, sluggish, and the closer you get to the house, the more disgusting the stench becomes. There is no wind. The air is thick with fungal spores and fecal particles.
The floor, the house, and everything else here is covered in fluff. Everything is infested with woodlice and maggots.
The walls of the house are full of holes, and slimy pus flows from the openings. There are also places that are crumbly and soft. They seem to hold the shape of the house together.
Silence reigns. You can hear the heavy footsteps, but nothing else.
The sleeping bag in the tent lies in a mush of organic remains. Tiny, newly hatched parasites are everywhere. The ambient temperature is lukewarm, so it is not necessary to sleep inside.

— Ralph Schuster, September 2025

Yannick Jadoul lives and works in Brussels. His practice is rooted in leather work, expanded through the language of jewellery, where materiality and luxury meet and question one another. I explore thresholds—between past and future, the visible and the unseen, the archetype and its transformation. Drawing on cosmology, astrology, and symbolic traditions, Yannick seeks to return to the roots of human imagination.
From this ground, he creates artifacts that feel both ancient and futuristic, familiar yet unknown. His works invite the viewer to encounter hidden connections, to sense the invisible woven into matter. They are fragments of memory and prophecy, holding traces of what has been and what may still emerge.

Tobias Maring lives and works in Berlin.
His artistic practice combines painting with sculptural approaches — for instance, by stretching colored canvas fabrics over supports of varying thicknesses and assembling them into relief-like pictorial objects. The result is abstract yet precise works whose presence is difficult to resist.

Ralphs is a nomadic project space, founded in 2017 in Cologne.