Minor Enclosures

Minor Enclosures, an exhibition by François Durel at Super Dakota, Brussels, explores the mechanics of appearance as a series of enclaves and opaque pockets where reality is influenced by the unacknowledged. Drawing on Freudian concepts of concealment and the uncanny, the exhibition posits that "good manners" are a technique of hiding truths, and the uncanny emerges when what is hidden surfaces. The exhibition views visibility as a regime of thresholds, where appearance is authorized and constrained by pre-existing forms and frames.

Durel examines domesticity not for comfort but to reveal its disciplinary core, employing operations like sutures, standardizations, and upturnings as methods of extraction. The works are presented as "micro-institutions" or "machines of obedience" that regulate availability and posture. Viewers encounter a syntax of impediments and detours, experiencing space as something that orients, slows, forbids, and prescribes. The exhibition highlights how constraint produces visibility and how the unsaid acts as a pressure, with imperfect surfaces revealing beauty through their negativity and scars. Tools of labor, displaced and rendered unusable, become relics of an order sustained by routine, while desire circulates at the point where attraction becomes injunction.