Transmutations – 2025/2026

Du 6 au 31 décembre 2025 (prolongation) / 11h-18h / vernissage 6 décembre 16h

Galerie Tirelli, rue du Lac 28c  https://www.galerie-tirelli.ch/

Un article de Katharina Holderegger: https://www.aica.ch/schmuck-und-politisches-bewusstsein-das-kollektiv-einzweidrei/

 

 

Dans l’entreprise capitaliste de production de valeur, la poudre noire incarne la violence structurelle qui réduit le vivant en marchandise, permettant ainsi la filtration sociale (eugéniste, raciste, sexiste, classiste, spéciste). Composante-clef des conquêtes coloniales, de la guerre à l’extraction minière, elle atomise les communautés et ressources, préparant le terrain à l’accumulation capitaliste. C’est également l’agent thermochimique du désencerclement et de la destruction du corps social lors des luttes populaires.
Elle illustre ce que Achille Mbembé nomme la nécropolitique : un techno-pouvoir qui, au-delà de réguler la vie (biopolitique foucaldienne), organise l’exposition à la mort. Le développement sidérant des violences anti-émeutes (37 yeux crevés et 4 mains arrachées durant les Gilets jaunes), la justification du génocide des Palestiniens-nes ou les appels à « accepter de perdre ses enfants » dans une guerre généralisée en sont des exemples récents.

Ici la poudre noire a permis de faire exploser des cylindres d’argent, matérialisant cette violence sociale, héritée de la violence coloniale symbolisée par les petits éléments en or. Ces éclatements rappellent aussi les innombrables luttes qui ont renversé des régimes de pouvoir apparemment inébranlables, et interrogent la nécessité de la légitime-défense face à la violence d’Etat.

 

Transmutations serie, 2926
Silver, gold / Lead, gold
CSS-STCS (IL) (2025) is part of Transmutations, a series I made in 2025, examining the central role of gunpowder in capitalism. Its impact on the colonial project was decisive, enabling invasions, resource extraction, and the suppression of resistance. Later, techniques derived from this history, including so-called “less-lethal” methods, were imported back to Europe to control and repress social movements.The brooches and rings of this series are produced through explosion and named after different models of sting grenades. The deformation of the silver containers materializes state violence, while the gold pins form an invisible link between the device and the body: gold is not the value but the structural condition. Transmutation is not an symbolic elevation of the soul but a concrete dark process, turning bodies and nature into wealth through pure chemical violence.

 

Cash – Precise Miniatures of the Economy

In Cash at Espace Borax, economic and social tensions condense into small, wearable situations. The alcove featuring works by Nora Delanoë (*1977, Montreux) and Jeannette Knigge (1973, Emmen/NL) remains particularly memorable. Delanoë’s Monopoly necklace, suspended over a neck-like protrusion, appears cheerful at first glance: small red and green houses, decoratively arranged. But then the lightness tips into sharpness. Game pieces turn into silent models of mortgages, forced evictions, and land as a commodity. The necklace is less a piece of jewellery than a topographical sketch of a market that sweeps across lives. Knigge’s glasses, made of titanium and gold, argue even more succinctly: they are both brilliant and blinding. Gold gleams precisely where transparency—indeed heightened clarity—should prevail. The object denies its wearer exactly what it promises: sight, a relationship to the world. Here, wealth is made visible not as adornment, but as an optical and cognitive obstacle, as a filter that conceals and casts into shadow everything that does not glitter and shine.

Transmutations at Galerie Tirelli – Jewellery in a State of Emergency

At Galerie L. & C. Tirelli, Christol’s works—by the long-standing spiritus rector of Einzweidrei—encounter the paintings of Saro Puma (*1963, Ribera/AG). Puma’s humans and animals, rendered in turquoise and muted contrasting colours, seem to dwell in a dense dream world. They stand still yet are full of movement, a movement directed inward. Among them lie Christol’s jewellery pieces like concentrated fragments from another register: gunpowder cartridges detonated outside a gun barrel, mounted on rings and brooches. These are forms that do not conceal injury, but preserve it. The traces of the explosions function as reminders of the exponentially increased violence with which pressure from above and conquest, as well as resistance and revolutions, have unfolded worldwide since the Chinese invention of gunpowder reached Europe around 1300.

Proximity

Perhaps this is Einzweidrei’s true achievement today: the collective translates political awareness into jewellery that quietly accompanies us through everyday life and enables conversations with those close to us as well as chance encounters—conversations that inevitably go beyond mere small talk.

Katharina Holderegger, AICA

Schmuck und politisches Bewusstsein: Das Kollektiv Einzweidrei