Cela doit-il être, cela est ! If the title of this presentation refers to the song by Léo Ferré, “Muss es sein ? Es muss sein!”, it also embraces its meaning. To offer knowledge to all, to shift the gaze, to escape the big institutions and allow art to reach universality. The places, like the creations, are essentialized in this vital need for exchange with the greatest number.

During her residencies at Jardin Rouge, Roxane Daumas discovered the site of Sidi Harazem in the region of the city of Fez in Morocco, and then feels certain to trigger the silent memory of this vestige. Entrusted in 1961 to the architect Jean-François Zevaco, the construction of the spa is a jewel of the modernist architectural aesthetic. A real place of life and confluence for the local population, the hotel is today abandoned, as if erased from memories.

« Places die like men, even though they seem to survive » wrote the essayist Joseph Joubert. It is this incoherence that inspires Roxane Daumas, this contradiction between what was and what is. In a subtle balance between reality and subjectivity, the artist mixes techniques, formats and shades, thus succeeding in making her works the manifestation of this paradox. The pencil figures what the eraser blurs, and colour, for the first time introduced, recalls the photographic universe of the 1980s through its past tones.
The work of Roxane Daumas is part of a duty to remember that is necessary for a proper understanding of history. It is these places that must not be forgotten, these markers of age that, in a last effort to manifest themselves, say so much about the messages they still carry. History continues to be written and hope remains.