The word parade carries within it a fertile ambiguity: both a gesture of protection and of exposure, of concealment and of unveiling. Derived from the verb parer – to defend oneself, to prepare oneself, to become visible – it evokes a surface movement, a strategy of appearance. Here, the parade is a space of emancipation through visibility as much as a terrain of resistance against the gaze that captures and freezes. What is shown never appears without reserve: brilliance shelters as much as it reveals, form protects as much as it offers itself. Judith Butler would say that showing oneself is already an act, a performative gesture through which the body asserts itself even as it eludes. Appearance is not transparency, but negotiation: a true politics of the visible.

The parade also evokes motion – a sense of unfolding, of appearance in procession. It is both choreography and structure, a succession of gestures that the material attempts to retain. As Guy Debord showed, spectacle is never pure illusion, but a condensation of the visible: a place where representation becomes resistance. Paola Siri Renard’s sculptures take their place within this tension. They orchestrate a field of forces between equilibrium and drift, weight and levitation. Nothing is stable: everything seems poised to tip, to disperse or to catch its breath, an oscillation between appearance and withdrawal, where flight becomes a mode of presence.

The exhibition Parade finds its origin in the observation of colonial equestrian monuments. Figures of stone or bronze still populate public space, erecting their horses as symbols of petrified glory. Through them, the history of power as spectacle is replayed: that of one body standing over another, of an order that shows itself in order to better impose itself. Here, however, the hierarchy is reversed: the horse leaves its pedestal, splits, fragments, and becomes the silent witness of a world in mutation.

The sculptures in the Midway Kin series feature life-size hand-sculpted horse legs, where human and animal stature merge. Fragments of driving power, they embody displacement, passage, the promise of movement without rider, freed from control. The missing body leaves the stage to a constellation of hybrid, anonymous, post-identity forms: a silent cortege reinventing the parade, no longer a demonstration of force, but a procession of survivals.

Each leg unfolds on two faces. One, anatomical, exposes disproportionate flesh, in a vein inherited from heroic representations of the fascist body. The other, ornamented, merges motif and matter, drawing on the lines of Art Nouveau – those curves, as Deborah Silverman has shown, born of colonial gestures of domination and measurement. Between muscle and decoration a tension arises: parade of power facing that of the living, staging of control against the cunning of movement.

The act of dissecting becomes symbolic gesture. It gives birth to doubles, unstable symmetries, speculative identities. These shapes seem animated by an ambiguous mimicry – neither entirely organic nor mechanical, but crossed by a breath of the in-between. Here lies another parade: that of camouflage, of mask, of metamorphosis. As in carnivals, the parade becomes theater of subversion, where hierarchies falter and bodies break free from their contours.

The stainless-steel structures that support these fragments recall both slaughter-house suspension systems and the mechanics of the zipper. They form a mobile scenography, a device at once visible and concealed. Between pageantry and apparatus, the parade reveals itself as twofold: a space where the pomp of the visible dialogues with the invisible mechanics of power.

The Carrier sculptures replay this paradox. Inspired by butterfly earring clasps, they enlarge to the scale of a head an accessory conceived to remain hidden – the fastener, the invisible mechanism of the jewel. This functional detail becomes a monumental face, overturning the hierarchy between ornament and structure, between what holds and what is displayed. In the post-abolition context of the Caribbean, ear piercing evokes the reclamation of the body, the right to adornment – to chosen visibility. The clasp then becomes a dual symbol: an instrument of restraint and emancipation, of fixation and escape. What holds allows for support; what conceals enables appearance.

The polished surface acts as a trap for the gaze: everything slides off it, nothing sticks. Space, bodies, and light are projected and erased upon it. As Édouard Glissant wrote, the mirror is never total; it disappoints, for it always returns something other than oneself. The brilliance becomes here a relational membrane, the skin of the world. The polish is not ostentation, but unsettling: a parade that resists capture, a surface that never yields the whole image.

The Iconic Domain series extend this reflection into the field of design. Their starting point is the hinge, the connecting element that holds and allows the movement of a door. The sculptures evoke at once architectural models, ceremonial furnishings from the inter-war period and bureaucratic devices of classification. Here, the furniture becomes façade, its geometric volumes replaying the characteristic proportions of the Art Deco style, while the administrative system becomes décor. The varnished wood, dissected then recomposed by the matte metal, unites with it to replay the tension between intimacy and exposure, between archive and spectacle.

Between the two spaces the continuity breaks, but the memory of passage remains: one place remembers the other. The rotation of the structures suggests both a spine and an industrial turbine, while the bronze half-legs prolong the momentum – fragments of a body in motion, tipping, parading. These sculptures are architectures of the gaze: they reveal the mechanics of appearing, the very conditions of visibility. Like a Debordian parade, they condense the spectacle while fracturing it: what they give to see is the structure that makes seeing possible.

The ensemble evokes a transitional state: architecture decomposes, furniture steps aside, bodies stretch beyond their limits. The works engage the viewer in a journey where plays of scale unfold, from the monumental to the minuscule, blurring reference points into an abstract and indeterminate space. This gradation from the visible to the hidden – from public space to the intimate, through the domestic – is accompanied by a missing half: a zipper without a match, a hinge without a door, a clasp without a jewel. It establishes a speculative link between the fragments and reveals the kinship that unites them. A silent theater where movement becomes memory, where structure, far from freezing, holds back just enough to let things pass.

— Sorana Munsya.