Inhabiting Through Gesture, Carrying Memory

Léuli Eshrāghi and Florencia Sosa Rey position their bodies where memory calls to be reawakened. Through performance, textiles, photography or the slowness of movement, they construct a delicate dialogue between presence, territory, and care. Their work explores the idea that inhabiting, in its most intimate or diasporic forms, can become a reparative act, a gesture of resistance against the violences of history, the ruptures of exile, and the colonial norms of visibility.

In Étude pour AOAULI (2020), Léuli Eshrāghi unfolds their body on an arid clay ground, wrapped in a shimmering fabric. Anchored in the landscape, the body performs a dance inspired by Sāmoan ceremonial gestures. The white cloth, both fluid and resilient, replaces the traditional barkcloth (siapo or tapa) and becomes the medium of an embodied language where each movement recalls ancestral memory transmitted through gesture rather than writing. The photograph captures a suspended moment, between memory and metamorphosis, in a landscape where earth and sky stretch with no visible bounds. The work inscribes an ancestral narrative in the present, one that resists erasure. It affirms a fluid, tender indigenous-queer art history, rooted in bodies as living archives to be reactivated.

In Comment rester (2024), Florencia Sosa Rey's performance takes root in a physical and emotional crossing. Lying on the ground, in direct contact with ice blocks encasing colored fabrics, they explore discomfort, fragility, and the effort to maintain a connection in the face of what melts, unravels, or dissolves. This work, born from solitary walks in Gaspésie and transposed to the Fonderie Darling in Montréal, questions the weight of silence and the desire for connection. The folded body, almost hidden in a soaked garment, becomes an interface between materials, sensations, and stories. Each color, each frozen fold of fabric, holds a piece of memory, as if the performative act seeks to thaw fragments of self and world, to make them tangible again.

Both artists share a finely attuned sensitivity to how territory shapes the body, and vice versa. They read space through touch, sensory engagement, slowness, and grounding. Their works do not impose, they propose: passages, invitations to feel differently, to coexist in ambiguity, vulnerability, and poetics.

Within the framework of Mémoire de l’avenir 2025, their duo composes a resonant space between the intimate and the political. Their work sketches out alternative ways of inhabiting: through care, the reclaiming of gestures, the memory of fibres, and tenderness as a tool for transformation. In a world saturated by speed and ruptures, their works slow us down, shift our perspective, and remind us that the body, performed, exposed, in relation, is a territory to be listened to.

Text by the AUM team