Lost Signals suggests both loss and more importantly a search, which lies at the heart of the collaboration between Letizia Romanini (Luxembourg) and Vincent Gallais (France). One year after their meeting in Yerevan, the two artists wished to return to Armenia to begin this long-term project, of which the end-of-residency exhibition sketches the first outlines.
The act of returning refers to the initial title, Circulation as a Motif, which clarifies the aim of their residency: to carry out sixteen walks following a protocol of three complementary actions photographing, recording sound, and collecting objects. Dividing both the number of walks (eight each) and their directions (clockwise for Letizia, counterclockwise for Vincent), the two artists individually explored the city of Yerevan and its surroundings along a geo-tracked route. It is this deferred encounter at the junction where the two directions of walking meet that this presentation seeks to give form to, through a video and a selection of photographs and objects serving as witnesses to this lived and shared moment.
This circular movement is inspired by the Armenian sun flower (Arevackhach), a symbol of eternity. The walks are the petals, the center is the residency at :DDD Kunst House, and the stem is the journey undertaken by Letizia to join Vincent by land from Luxembourg. This structure embodies the idea of eternal renewal, of a beginning that already contains its own end. This iterative spatial and temporal relationship creates an interstice in reality that becomes a metaphor for the fragility of the world, suspended between stability and instability. The resulting disorientation confronts their viewpoints, transforming them into vanishing points toward elsewhere.
The process they developed made circulation the subject of their research, and lost signals the motifs of a new relationship to landscape and territory one that must be rediscovered. It resembles a form of surrender to the territory, with the landscape becoming its receptacle. This sensory approach is significant in that each artist experiences it differently and at varying scales. From the minimal to the maximal, from the organic to the industrial, from the original to hybridization, they highlight how the landscape is reconfigured, even de-figured. Trace and imprint implicitly, humanity and its shadow, in positive and negative. The two artists thus focus equally on voids and solids, examining and scrutinizing reality in order to recombine it through images plural and objects as intimate and collective memory.
Lost Signals embodies this experience of limits, edges, and material, immaterial, and symbolic borders. Everything is a matter of inside and outside, center and periphery. The two artists therefore offer us new ways of seeing and sensing the city and its territories, leaving us free to construct our own cartography and narrative.
Diane Der Markarian @ddermarkarian
December 2025