SoRA
Sanctuary

MEET MY PRINTER!, an exhibition featuring a selection of works by French artist duo Raffard–Roussel. Raffard–Roussel’s practice rests on a close attention to gestures, inscriptions, and the concealed layers within everyday machines. Their work investigates the relationship between human attention—or its absence—and the everyday object, approached both as a physical thing and as an entity mediated through language. In this exhibition, the focus is on the printer: a symbol of inevitable obsolescence, often discarded at the first sign of failure. Drawing on a printer manual, the artists isolated the hand gestures required to make the machine function, re-enacting them as paper casts. Turning inward, they photographed the cryptic alphanumeric codes hidden within the printer’s components—texts typically unnoticed or unseen.

Is it not paradoxical that the silent language of the hand is instantly comprehensible, while the encoded language of the machine remains elusive? By revealing both the visible and the hidden, the artists provoke questions about legibility, labor, and the boundaries of what we choose—or are able—to understand and attend to.

Matthieu Raffard and Mathilde Roussel are artists, researchers, and teachers. Associate Professors in the transdisciplinary research program ArTeC and in Fine Arts at Paris 8 University, their collaborative practice explores the ethical and aesthetic issues raised by our use of technology within a context of extractivism and resource depletion. They have recently authored two forthcoming books: À contre-emploi. Manuel expérimental pour réveiller notre curiosité technologique (À contre-emploi: An Experimental Manual to Awaken Our Technological Curiosity), which will be published in October 2025, and Bourrage papier (Paper Jam), with an introduction by Yves Citton, which will be released in November 2025.

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Contributors

Organized by the Strother School of Radical Attention

Curated by Federica Soletta