FRENCH PLACE is an art organisation and an incubator for critical contemporary practices. Operating as a proto–institution — situated between an art foundation and a gallery — we support experimentation, foster exchange, and offer time and space for collaboration.

Founded at 9 French Place, Shoreditch, London — FRENCH PLACE enters its next chapter in Milan, where our programme extends across exhibitions, an artist residency, and research–driven initiatives that support deep engagement with contemporary practice.

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BASEL SOCIAL CLUB 2026: OFFICE,

MARCO SICILIANO

14.06.26—20.06.26

Installation views, 23:59, 2026, courtesy of FRENCH PLACE & the artist

FRENCH PLACE is pleased to participate in Basel Social Club 2026: Office, on view June 14–20 in Basel, presenting Marco Siciliano.
This year’s edition occupies a vacant office building near Basel SBB, activating its floors through exhibitions, performances, music, gastronomy, and informal encounters.
Positioning the office as both subject and scenography, Basel Social Club engages with evolving conditions of work, time, and production in the context of digitalization, remote infrastructures, and artificial intelligence.

The project proposed by FRENCH PLACE presents a constellation of site-responsive works by Berlin-based artist Marco Siciliano conceived as a subtle occupation of spaces positioned at the margins of productivity. Siciliano approaches architecture as an ideological device to be suspended from its function rather than simply used. The works do not introduce new forms of production, but instead propose moments of disactivation: infrastructures that emerge into visibility, and surfaces that preserve traces of past temporalities.

Operating between public and private, visibility and erasure, function and desire, Siciliano’s practice transforms the office into a suspended environment: an architecture on the verge of exhaustion. The works inhabit marginal zones of the building, transitional spaces that are not neutral sites, but rather hidden infrastructures allowing systems of productivity to function while remaining unseen. By intervening within these areas, the project exposes the unconscious rhythms of contemporary labour: fatigue, maintenance, repetition, and delay.

In dialogue with the fair’s exploration of the underground as a space of resistance, Siciliano understands non-productivity not as absence, but as a structural condition. Time throughout the exhibition is stretched and suspended: a minute before midnight becomes infinite in 23:59, while the Myopia Series withholds complete visibility through obscured photographic surfaces that can never be entirely grasped at once.

In a context increasingly marked by the dematerialisation of the body and the substitution of physical experience with circulating images, the works insist on presence: they can only be fully encountered by those who remain, wait, look closely, and experience them in real time.
Rather than transforming the office into a spectacle, the project reclaims it as a porous environment in which work, rest, intimacy, and exhaustion coexist. In this sense, Siciliano’s installations propose a temporary interruption of the logic of efficiency and extraction — a space where silence, flicker, and fragility become forms of resistance.

Press kit
List of works