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.
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.
EXHIBITION,
Matthias Odin, CIMA 12.03.26—19.04.26
At the origin of the project lies a weapons factory decommissioned at the end of the last century. Moss and water slowly reclaim the space; wooden crates rise in unstable formations; technical drawings and computers lie scattered across the floor in disordered arrangements. On one of the crates appears a label: “CIMA (Anonymous Material Identification Tag).” It is from this encounter that the exhibition project takes shape. The military crates are taken up by Matthias Odin as both formal matrix and conceptual device, to be reworked through a process of sculptural translation. If at first the artist was unable to name what he was confronting — struck by the aesthetic shock produced by the discovery — the revelation of the factory’s actual nature radically transformed his perception. What had appeared as a mute and empty shell could no longer be observed innocently once recognized as a component of a military infrastructure. The exhibition thus assumes an intrinsically political dimension.
Abandoned at a historical moment that seemed to herald a retreat from large-scale conflict, the crates re-emerge today under radically altered conditions. Presented as ruins, they are stripped of their function and subjected to a museographic recontextualization that suspends their original purpose, repositioning them as forms to be contemplated rather than used. No longer instruments, they become minimal sculptures, suspended between abstraction and testimony — traces of something that persists without ever fully returning.
Matthias Odin’s practice is grounded in walking, searching, and collecting. Informed by urban exploration, Situationist psychogeography, and Stalker’s theory of promenadology, his methodology entails direct engagement with locations and materials. He intervenes at the threshold where objects transition from use to obsolescence, identifying within this condition a latent sculptural potential. The resulting works function as near-readymades, minimally yet decisively rearticulated.
Glass plays a central role within this process. Associated with postmodern architecture, it introduces distance, reflection, and refraction, implicating the viewer while rendering the works responsive to light and atmospheric variation. Like a star that continues to radiate after its death, the works sustain a residual luminosity, from which emerges an inquiry into survival and transformation: how forms and histories persist beyond their original function.