Mitte, Berlin
Émilie Pitoiset
So Much Tenderness
Klemm'sKlemm's is delighted to present So Much Tenderness and exhibition by Émilie Pitoiset. So Much Tenderness proceeds with some of the lines of investigation that Pitoiset has been exploring over the years, debunking silent rituals while sketching an involving map of social exhaustion as it points at the threshold of cuteness and collapse. In this new body of work, the focus shifts to ‘cuteness,’ and particularly to the role of mascots, which Pitoiset has been delving into more recently – aiming at the promise of innocence and comfort it blends, as well as the act of numbing it conceals. A powerful tool of seduction with deceptively innocent contours, cuteness has established itself in capitalist societies as an imposition of idealised innocence, which can serve both as an instrument of gentleness and a tool for controlling and commodifying emotions, in this way blending tenderness and domination. Centering the tension in the figure of the mascot, So Much Tenderness follows an itinerary often deployed in Pitoiset’s practice, paving the way to analysis through a group of works spanning from sound to photo-collage that compose a room-filling installation, introducing, on the one hand, the notion of desire while playing, on the other, with a sense of absence and unconscious – staging an atmosphere of controlled, ritualized, performative suffocation.