Margarita Wenzel — Traits Libres Gallery, Paris — Critique — Slash Paris

The Traits Libres gallery presents, with It Was Never Meant to Last Forever, a radical installation that reflects the depth of Margarita Wenzel’s research.

Born in 1989, the artist, multiplying her fields of inquiry around human and sonic interactions, and narratives carried by dominant voices, explores here the humanity of a deeply symbolic instrument—the organ—bringing together, in a gesture that is subtly polysemic despite its apparent austerity, two dimensions whose seeming contradiction highlights their richness.

By developing its organic nature (analogous to the principles that presided over its creation) through the erection of an almost floral form laid on the ground, Wenzel appropriates a world-object to sketch out an alternative point of entry into our history and to outline a reflection of this organ-as-voice that binds us.

Voice, breath, life, and vibration unfold in a movement where everything resonates with meaning, where each note echoes a new field of reflection (and thus investigation). By extending her variation onto sheets sculpted from the pipes of a dismantled organ, Wenzel sustains and revives the voice of an object whose involvement, during darker