MIXING GENDER ICON
Cut-out brown kraft paper, 45 pieces Variable sizes, human scale, abandonned Hotel, 14 Avenue des Peupliers, 35510 Cesson-Sévigné, France.
This former hotel, previously converted into an emergency shelter, closed its doors permanently in March 2025. While vacant now, its manager remains onsite for security as the building awaits demolition.
Along the river-facing façade, life-sized pictograms of people cut from brown kraft paper are pasted along the walkway. These figures remix standardized signage like restroom icons, pedestrian symbols, and safety figures into new configurations. Some wear dresses, others pants.
The signs blur across gender, body, and role. Heads and torsos are mismatched. The anonymous becomes specific. The generic becomes uncanny.
The paper figures act as ghosts or stand-ins for the many lives that passed through the building, first as a hotel, later as a shelter. Migrants, workers, tourists, and families—these temporary occupants are given a poetic form that is both visible and barely there. The brown kraft paper holds a kind of vulnerability, like a paper lantern: ephemeral, grounded, handmade.
Installed against a wall of concrete and glass, the icons mirror the bodies of passersby and create a quiet dialogue between past and present. They do not shout. They remain flat, silent, staring back.
The silhouettes along the façade attempt to recall the human presence that once animated its corridors.
Samuel Park for uncommissioned.art
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