Tout doit disparaître brings together works by Elvire Ménétrier, Veronika Desova, and Slava George around two products — soap and rose oil— rooted in ancestral forms of craftsmanship that are now undergoing widespread industrialization. Emerging from artisanal traditions deeply embedded in their respective territories — Marseille’s soap- making tradition and Bulgaria’s Valley of Roses — these materials serve as starting points for a reflection on the relationships between the body, industry, and material memory.

So what is it that has to disappear? The body, the old body that is, for it to appear a new body, a renewed body, the body of the past, that undergoes metamorphosis.

It all starts with Athena. Athena was, in a way, an unwanted child. Zeus did not want any more children, sons in particular, for his paranoia about being defeated or overrun. Once, Zeus lay with Metis (2) and then regretted it immediately after – the god of all gods was frightened by a prophecy that Metis would bear a son more powerful than him. Now pregnant with Athena, Metis was forcefully transformed into a fly and consequently swallowed by her lover to prevent the birth of their child. But an Oceanid is a sage, a witch, a woman. She does not rest without work. Inside Zeus’ body, Metis created an armor for her daughter, who at the time resided in her father’s head, giving him insufferable headaches, as daughters do. When the time came, Athena was born, emerging from Zeus’s head, all grown-up and in full gear.

In the myth of Zeus, a god, but also a man, swallowing and birthing, Elvire recognizes ideologies of the technological revolution, and one in particular: genesis by oneself, procreation via man, a metaphorical (or not) outside-of- woman-womb. Here, she explores the concept of technical autophagy – where a system evolves by devouring its own source – artificial intelligence is an example of such. But then, in this perfect symbiosis, something happens – jaded with its own body and the ever-renewing versions of it, the machine fails, becomes a zombie – “a model collapse”. Human bodies are devoured by modern technology in a spectacular way – biometrics, targeting, surveillance – becoming other, symbolic bodies (2). Digital, weightless, bodiless bodies are easier to consume, spit, multiply.

Elvire’s works – a soap kinetic sculpture documenting episodes of Metis’ journey, also developed within a small- scale series of images, crafted from surgical silicone and embedded in computer motherboards, and a painting of a throat with an aluminum hyoid bone (3), an obkov (4)- explore different stages of these cyborgian processes. Special attention is given to the gentle forces of resistance – what remains, what gets stuck, what continues to speak from within the body that has swallowed it.