Le coeur et les poumons - in collaboration with Emanuela Campoli

For this two-part exhibition across the two galleries represents the first in the new joint representation of Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann by Galerie Allen and now Emmanuela Campoli. Here, Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann presents new and ongoing bodies of work across two distinct spaces. The project draws on the symbolic, anatomical, and relational dimensions of two vital, interdependent organs. Each gallery functions as a distinct site, yet together they form a whole where the works reflect on architectural context, systems of circulation.

At Galerie Allen, Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann turns to the lungs, not only as organs of breath and survival, but also as spaces of rhythm, exchange, and fragility. A central element is The Tobacco Files (2022?ongoing), a visual archive composed of thousands of images sourced from advertisements, political campaigns, cinema, blog, social network and anti-smoking materials. This encyclopaedic collection is intuitively organised, grouped and presented on industrial shelving, available for the public to consult. It serves as a cultural investigation of how tobacco circulates through visual and ideological histories, embodying seduction, resistance, and control. Nearby, a sculpture made of two facing glass vitrines contains discarded blister packaging from cigarette packs. These empty containers are recontextualised as residues of consumption, hinting at proximity, containment, and the porous boundaries between user and product. 

If Maisons Françaises, une collection (2012?ongoing), presented at Emanuela Campoli, lingers in the intimacy of staged interiors and the quiet insistence of visual suggestion, The Tobacco Files maps a culture through its public surfaces ? political, commercial, moral. The selected work invites comparison to a literary image: not a document, but an atmosphere that clings to the objects it depicts. Like a sentence that trails behind its own meaning, theses images carries an aura, seductive, coded, and quietly prescriptive. Presented here in resonance with the other pieces, it functions less as a centrepiece than as a counterpoint, inserting questions of interior staging and aspirational aesthetics into an environment otherwise dominated by residual, consumable materials and the dispersed visual economy of smoking. Echoing this displacement of public politics to private spaces, Gaslight (2025) a metal structure composed like a chandelier holding a lighter in a continuous state of ignition, introduces a muted but insistent tension within the enclosed space of the gallery. Its small, unwavering flame becomes a quiet marker of duration, fragility, and the volatility that underlies the domestic sphere, evoking the almost imperceptible mechanics of persuasion and control.

At Emanuela Campoli, Badaut Haussmann turns to the heart - a site of affection and care, but also a contested space where emotional labour, desire and power are at stake. The works unfold continuously throughout the different rooms of the gallery with some series installed at a recurring pace, as if their nature could be revealed through their own variations. In her almost surgical actions, Badaut Haussmann dissects, subtracts but also inserts elements, repairing and diverting the function of existing iconography, films and objects.

One of them is her ongoing series Maisons Françaises, une collection (2012?ongoing), which opens the exhibition with a full-blown image of a luxury handbag and its calculatedly spilled interior. Stripped of its original context - an interior decoration and lifestyle magazine - the image reveals itself as a staging ground of aspirational, prescriptive femininity. The artist, a mother herself, reflects on the role of her arms as support in her series of Mamans ? different sets of arms that iterate throughout the exhibition as props, noble bronze sculptures, plaster studies or mannequins. The works convey kindness and respect towards the figure of the mother but also point out the limits that motherhood imposes on the body.

Jewellery, a marketed symbol of desirability and status, but also a reward or measure of a women?s worth, is present in her installation at the library on the first floor. In her Cosmetiques blanches (2025), jewellery is veiled in see-through sleeves, in Cat Lady (2025), also from Maisons Françaises, they are worn lustfully on a cat. A powerful symbol that bridges ancient reverence with viral culture, the cat is also used to caricature single, liberal women who are allegedly unhappy or childless. 

The association between the heart and the home is read by Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann through the lens of feminist spatial theory. Space reflects and reinforces gender roles in a system of divides, out of which the public and the private is the most stubborn one. Her paravent Domestique Gore (2025) is the support of a set of images from films that stress the power relations embedded in intimacy. In her work, cinema is not about storytelling so much as a lens through which spatial dynamics and the politics of architecture are made visible.  In the last room, a pair of knee-high boots attached to a gas cylinder (La Maman et la Putain, 2025) sits on a red carpet, reflecting domestic life as self-contained and inert in appearance, also present in her raw photographs of faded flowers. Based on Marguerite Duras? film Baxter, Vera Baxter - in which a woman finds herself trapped by her marriage and isolated in an elegant modernist villa by the sea - the work captures a sense of latent pressure, where the home becomes both a site of passive comfort and space of entrapment masked by elegance.

Through her double exhibition, Badaut Haussmann works within the rhythm of breathing and beating?the body?s most fundamental acts of survival?suggesting that even our most automatic functions are implicated in larger frameworks of seduction and subjugation of both respiration and the spaces we call home.