At La Traverse in Marseille, Victor Siret presents "A/C Tales," a solo exhibition where the fantasized America of childhood meets the reality of a Mediterranean city. All embroidered stitch by stitch, by hand, on canvas.
“Air conditioning gave birth to the endless building.” It is with this quote from architect Rem Koolhaas that Victor Siret opens his exhibition. It says much about what awaits the visitor: a world where artificial comfort has transformed everything and where the air from air conditioners has replaced the mistral wind.
You enter the exhibition and think you recognize images: an American desert, motel facades, neon signs, cacti. Then you get closer and realize that everything is embroidered. By hand. On canvas. The gesture slows everything down.
Based in Marseille since 2022, Victor Siret presents "A/C Tales," his first series of works dedicated to his adopted city. But America is never far away. It's everywhere: in the references, the signs, the desert landscapes.
Embroidery as a critical gesture
The exhibition's title plays on a double meaning. A/C is the English abbreviation for Air Conditioned . As for Tales, it refers to stories with moral lessons. The combination is programmatic: what Siret recounts is not innocent.
The eponymous work, Air Conditioner, clearly illustrates this. A simple outdoor air conditioning unit, depicted from the front, is embroidered in half-stitch on canvas. The object is commonplace. But by choosing it as the sole subject, Siret imbues it with a new significance: air conditioning is both a symptom of climate change and an individual response to that same change, the collective cost of which is silently accumulating.
The embroidery technique is also significant. Siret starts with disparate images—cinema, advertising, etc.—extracts them from their context, and reconstructs them by hand on canvas. This transition from digital to textile forces a slowing down, a distancing. The image is recomposed, sometimes enriched with interventions in graphite or colored pencil.
An American street 251 centimeters long
The most ambitious work in the exhibition is titled Driving back to a long gone summer . It is an embroidery measuring 251 centimeters long by 43 centimeters high. The horizontal format is inspired by David Hockney; the formal logic by Robert Venturi, who in Learning from Las Vegas theorized an architecture designed to be viewed in motion.
What the visitor sees, however, is not America, but a composite landscape. Real buildings stand alongside fictional places: the Casa Vagantes in San Sebastián, a building by Frank Gehry since demolished, the Café Masque in Nantes, which the artist frequented as a child. Everywhere, numbers refer to loved ones: his mother's initial and year of birth in place of a street number, "Since 1982" for his partner, "1935" for his maternal grandmother.
Marseille crossed by signs
In Everything Must Go!, Marseille is at the center, contaminated by external influences. The Déborah Mariage boutique, a true landmark on Rue de Rome, now closed, still displays its white wedding dress behind an emptying window. Next to it, a "For Rent" sign.
Did you look at the sky tonight? evokes a nocturnal panorama laden with references: the chimney of Le Corbusier's Cité Radieuse, a villa on the Corniche Kennedy, a chair by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. On the wall, a pizzeria sign alludes to the "Pizzagate" conspiracy. On the floor, the word "Fidelio," the password for secret parties in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut . In the embroidered sky, the constellations of Taurus and Leo—the astrological signs of Victor Siret and his sister—mingle with Elon Musk's Starlink satellites.
Urban fabric is perhaps the most directly Marseillais work in the exhibition. It is a patchwork measuring 250 × 144 centimeters that brings together the embroidered signs of real businesses that have made up, or still make up, the urban landscape of the artist.
Between familiarity and confusion
From one work to the next, "A/C Tales" constructs a strange territory, neither entirely real nor entirely fictional. Contact takes place at the Area 51 Alien Center, a real tourist site in Nevada transformed into a souvenir industry centered around the alien myth. Heaven's Night borrows its name from the strip club in the video game Silent Hill 2. Finally at Home places an Airstream camper in a New Mexico desert where the first nuclear test in history took place in 1945.
Goodbye Supernova , the only interior scene in the exhibition, shows an apparently tranquil living room: a fireplace, a plant, a rug.
Each work initially offers an entry point through color: the embroideries are vibrant, almost joyful, before revealing darker symbols. It is also necessary to share the multiple references that inform this work.
Perhaps that's the lesson of "A/C Tales": the images that have shaped us are never innocent. And embroidering them by hand, slowly, stitch by stitch, is a way of truly seeing them for the first time.
"A/C Tales" The Crossing
16 Traverse Ste Hélène, 13007 Marseille
From 14 May to 4 July 2026
latraverse.org
