One Bed, Two Blankets, 49 Rules to Move Out Peacefully
Sabine Hess et Nicolas Polli
The project by Sabine Hess and Nicolas Polli emerges from this attentive listening and from a careful focus on everyday gestures, objects, rhythms, and micro-events that shape the daily life of a couple sharing the same space. At the heart of Atelier Robert, they question the space they have inhabited, shaped, and traversedtogether. They observe how two bodies respond to one another, adjust, brush past each other, and coexist within an architecture of everyday life composed of silences, minute gestures, and barely perceptible rituals. Each object becomes a trace, each image a breath, each fragment a suspended memory.
At the intersection of photography and installation, their work reveals the fragile poetry of living together: an unstable balance between attachment and detachment, presence and withdrawal, continuity and transformation.This work also unfolds at a pivotal moment: the departure from this residency, understood not as a rupture but as a conscious, lucid, and deeply inhabited passage. The atelier becomes a space layered with experiences, where each trace, each arrangement, each image carries the memory of time lived together. Leavingthus turns into a sensitive act, a gesture of homage addressed to the place and to what it has enabled, welcomed, and protected.
After several years of living and working in this space, the exhibition presents itself as a final chapter, a way of accompanying the emotional and logistical challenges involved in leaving a place that has become central to their personal and artistic history.
The proposed dispositif reveals a sensitive cartography of dwelling, where the site is no longer merely a setting but a relational organism shaped by interactions, mutual care, and intimate narratives. By making perceptible the fragile and evolving dimension of living together, the project resonates strongly with the notion of vulnerability: as attention, responsibility, listening, and recognition of the other. At the same time, the atelier transforms into an inner landscape, a chamber of resonance where lived experience, time, and memory overlap. Space is no longer simply a container, but a skin, a shared breath, an affective territory marked by the softness of habits and the tension of metamorphosis.
To extend this experience, “The Last Slice” (31.05.26, 16 :30) will close the festival within Atelier Robert (moments of discussion, shared encounters, and sensitive activations around a pizza), inviting the public to slow down, to take the time to inhabit the space, to linger within it, and to experience it in its relational and temporal dimensions. These encounters will offer a gradual immersion into the space, allowing visitors to perceive the residency not as a mere exhibition venue, but as a place to live, traverse, and collectively inhabit. Here, the atelier-exhibition becomes a living space, traversed by presences, memories, and gestures that continue to resonate.
Year of production: 2026
Finishing: Last Slice
Talk with Sabine Hess and Nicolas Polli, followed by a drink and some pizza.
Atelier Robert
Chem. Paul-Robert 11
2502 Bienne
