During the Renaissance, artists were said to be born under the influence of Saturn: planet of melancholy, withdrawal, contemplation, and slow thought. Saturn governed serious temperaments, studious minds, and forms of creation nourished by solitude, patience, and doubt. With Comme Saturne, Yto Barrada reactivates this ancient figure as a tool for reading the present. She extends this cosmological imaginary to ritual, myth, labor, agriculture, matter, and language.
The title also refers to the sentence pronounced in 1793 by Pierre-Victurnien Vergniaud: “The Revolution, like Saturn, devours its children.” This political image meets here the dévoré, a textile technique that emerged in the eighteenth century in which the surface pile of a fabric is chemically dissolved so that a pattern appears through subtraction. A form is born through disappearance, and beauty emerges through an attack on matter. This double movement— destruction and generation—structures the project as a whole.
Conceived as a suite for Saturn, the pavilion unfolds through sequences, repetitions, and returns. Visitors move through spaces draped in wool and populated by sculptures, films, typographic prints, mechanical devices, and transformed objects. Daylight acts here as a material in its own right: it slowly fades the hanging curtains, alters their surfaces, and inscribes time into the exhibition itself.
Barrada has long been interested in the history of textiles as a site where global economy, domestic gestures, industry, labor, and empire intersect. Before industrialization, textile production was one of the great engines of world trade; it later moved from the household to the factory, from hand-spinning to mechanization, and from wool and silk toward cotton. The routes of color, competition over dye plants, access to raw materials, labor hierarchies, and forms of knowledge made invisible all run through the exhibition.
At the heart of the pavilion, Barrada proposes a new theory of color applied to textiles. Major Western chromatic theories were largely conceived for painting, paper, or optics, rarely for cloth. Barrada begins instead with wool, natural dyes, baths, mordants, and chemical modifications to imagine another system: more empirical and more alive, but also more unstable. Developed with dyers, conservators, artisans, and gardeners, this work centers orally transmitted knowledge. It also questions the universalism inherited from the Enlightenment by challenging the classifications and historical codifications that long determined legitimate forms of knowledge. This is one of the project’s central stakes.
This research enters into dialogue with The Mothership, the dye garden and residency space founded by the artist in Tangier. There, color depends on climate, water, season, soil, errors, and accidents. It is never abstract: it is relational.
Language occupies a central place in Comme Saturne. Barrada works through homophones, shifts in meaning, and technical vocabularies in which words exceed their original use: mordant, fugitive, exhaustion, fixer. The chains of association that run through the exhibition evoke both scholarly inquiry and anxious thought: seeing signs, links, and rebounds everywhere.
Another tutelary presence is OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), the French collective that made constraint into a motor of creation. A wheel of rules and constraints pays homage to it. For Barrada, the rule is not a limit but a ruse for extending time, producing new forms, and surviving the dead ends of the present.
Throughout the exhibition, Saturn returns in multiple guises: god of time and the seasons, figure of melancholy, force of destruction, but also promise of renewal. Ancient narratives—the goat Amalthea, the cornucopia, the child saved from the devouring father— intersect here with contemporary myths: infinite abundance, technological salvation, limitless extraction, and the future colonization of other worlds.
Between cosmology and politics, agriculture and abstraction, dark humor and historical gravity, Comme Saturne offers less an escape than a tool for poetic survival: a lucid way of inhabiting the instability of the world without surrendering to melancholy.
Photo © Jacopo La Forgia - Institut français