Weaving, for Marie Hazard, is not merely about producing a decorative surface: it is about building a place. Every stretched, knotted, twisted thread, every chosen material, every repeated gesture is a way of inhabiting space, of patiently constructing it on the loom, with the strength of arms and legs. The textile thus becomes architecture—a flexible, mobile, intimate architecture—a language of construction, a medium capable of structuring a space while letting it breathe. By questioning the autonomy of the work and its subordination to the wall, the artist embarks for the first time in this exhibition on conceptual explorations of three-dimensionality. Her pieces detach from the wall to assert themselves in space: they become panels, columns, buttresses, portals.

The aim here is not to construct closed spaces, but to open, create passages, porous thresholds that invite passage. For it is in the concrete and symbolic construction of a space of one’s own, a place of freedom and creation, that Marie Hazard truly engages herself. If a place— in the anthropological sense of the term—is a point of reference for individuals, a site imbued with history and a stage for social relationships, the spaces that Marie Hazard’s works transport us to tend instead to unsettle our certainties. She proposes an entirely different experience: one of solitude, wandering, and personal introspection.

Weaving here is an embodied act. It involves the whole body: the repetition of the gesture, its rhythm, its duration become choreography. Trained in dance, Marie Hazard weaves as one composes a movement: chaining gestures like steps, in a back-and-forth between tension and relaxation, concentration and self-forgetting. The loom imposes a discipline, a frontality, but the materials escape this rigor. Paper, linen, raffia, tire inner tube, copper, silver: all these materials carry within them a memory, an origin. Some are noble, others recycled or raw, but all are reinvested, transformed. This deep interest in materials allows Marie Hazard to propose works with tactile and sensual qualities, permeable separations, neither exclusive nor restrictive, that invite one to pass through their surface and engage with matter.

Marie Hazard’s weavings are assemblages, fragments arranged like a sentence or a poem. The textile becomes a language: a language without fixed grammar, made of sensitive associations, of intimate echoes. Writing is everywhere: in the very structure of the thread, in the motifs, in the black-and white photographs embedded in the material, in the interruptions of the weave, in the changes in materials. The text hides there and breathes, like the titles of the works, those perforated pieces that let air, light, and memories pass through. Because memory always emerges in these pieces. Memory of a gesture, of a tool, of a place, of a fragile body. Memory of a room, too—that “room of one’s own” that the artist evokes, as a protective space, a survival envelope that gradually opens to others.

In their textures and abstract forms, Marie Hazard’s works are shrouded worlds [des mondes enveloppés], inviting wandering and travel. Conceived as a journey through these environments and landscapes, the exhibition is structured around three distinct spaces, each in its own way enveloping and inhabited, personal and shared.

(Text by Marie Perennès. July 2025)