BAD THINGS HAPPEN
BYRON GAGO
Bodies Farming · 2022
BAD THINGS HAPPEN is a multi-component installation series shown at Maison Gaudard in 2022. It examines the relationship between subject and context through spatial display systems that stage power, arrangements in which one part is held above and another held below. Across four works the same body recurs at different stages of containment: built, sustained, subordinated, expelled. The title is deliberately flat. It refuses the moral vocabulary of suffering art (violence, crisis, trauma) because those words pre-position the viewer in pity or indignation, both of which are ways of being elsewhere. BAD THINGS HAPPEN says instead: this is a condition of the room you walked into.
The four works are not independent pieces sharing a room; they are positions on a single axis. Closer to Grey is the body in the process of being built, the scaffolding state. Leviathan is the body suspended in artificial life-support. Combat de Reines is the body subordinated to an industrial frame. EXIT #1 — EXIT #2 is the body placed in an environment that cannot sustain it at all. Read in sequence, the series tracks one body across stages of containment, from construction to expulsion.
The works critique hierarchy by reproducing it cleanly rather than by inverting it. Each one arranges the organic below the industrial, the suspended below the supporting, the body below the apparatus: the structure you already live inside, made visible by being built again in front of you. This is the risk the series accepts: that replication without acknowledgement can read as endorsement. The wager is that a hierarchy shown plainly, at the scale of your own body, is harder to look past than one that has been argued against.
The setting is part of the content, and part of the discomfort. To stage a series about precarity, constraint and improvised survival inside Maison Gaudard (a bourgeois interior in Geneva, insured and finished) is a displacement the work has to own rather than smooth over. When Closer to Grey borrows the visual language of autoconstrucción, the Latin American practice of self-built housing made from whatever is at hand, that language loses in translation exactly what it means at its source. The series keeps the displacement legible instead of resolving it: the borrowed survival logic and the privileged room held in the same frame.
"Works that critique hierarchical power by deploying hierarchical arrangements in their own structure risk circularity: the message is the same as the medium, and neither is examined. Does the series create critical distance from the power dynamics it depicts, or simply re-enact them?"
Critical review, 2026
Re-enact, on purpose. And the risk is real. The works are not opposing hierarchy by turning it upside down; they are making it visible by reproducing it cleanly, because it is the structure the viewer already lives inside. If that reads as circular, the circularity is the form. The critic is right that the form has to acknowledge itself: without acknowledgement, replication becomes endorsement. So the series tries to name what it is doing: to put the viewer in the position of control that Leviathan builds at gaze height, and to make them feel the weight of looking rather than offering it as a pleasure.
BAD THINGS HAPPEN
2022
Series · Maison Gaudard
- Multi-component installation
- Steel · glass · latex · ceramics · neon · mycelium
01 / 03
Leviathan is a transparent plexiglass tank in a black metal frame, filled with water. Inside floats a body cast in latex, poured in layers onto an epoxy mould taken from the inside of a male torso, so that what the tank holds is the interior surface of a body turned outward. An air pump beneath the structure pushes oxygen through tubes into the water and the form, raising bubbles that read as breath. The work is small, lit by a single overhead spot in a darkened room, and at first glance it appears alive. 160 × 45 × 35 cm.
The title is not homage to Hobbes but a refutation in miniature. Hobbes's Leviathan is sovereign power figured as a giant body composed of all the smaller bodies it commands, total integration. This is the reverse: a single small body, alone in its tank, dependent on the machine that breathes for it. It is Leviathan minus the subjects, what the fiction of total integration becomes once the integration breaks down. Its only property is that it requires constant maintenance to stay "alive," and the maintenance is mechanical.
And nothing is alive. The latex needs no oxygen; the pump sustains only the appearance of life: the current that stirs the water, the bubbles that imply respiration. The apparatus of life-support is keeping nothing alive, and the viewer reads breathing where there is only circulation. Latex carries its own lineage: medical gloves, disposable barriers, the surfaces between bodies and clinical procedures. So the floating form is medicalised material shaped into an interior. Read against the title, the claim is contemporary: sovereignty as the maintenance of a body that cannot live without external support.
Leviathan
2022
Work · life-support sculpture
- Plexiglass · water · latex · air pump
- 160 × 45 × 35 cm
01 / 08
Closer to Grey is an installation of industrial glass, neon and electrical components, arranged to read the space it occupies rather than to fill it. Its vocabulary is provisional: construction-grade materials placed where the building had already left openings, in the formal language of autoconstrucción and the temporary, unfinished installation. The precarity looks like the residue of a work-in-progress, evidence of a process of appropriating and using space; but the incompletion is the finished form, not a stage on the way to one.
The work was made inside a building that was itself unfinished, Maison Gaudard mid-renovation, and it chose to work with that condition rather than against it. The neon runs where the electrical conduit already ran; the glass leans where the wall left a recess. The installation registers the building's provisional state and adds one more layer to it. So the "use of space" the work performs is really the building's own continuing claim on itself, made visible: the user is the room, and the work is shaped by what the architecture, the owners and the regulations already permit.
That places the work inside the same problem the series carries. Autoconstrucción is what people build when the state will not house them and the market cannot reach them: salvaged material, exposed rebar, work left unfinished because staying alive matters more than finishing. To borrow its look in a Geneva gallery is to translate a survival logic into an aesthetic, and the translation costs exactly what it borrows. The displacement is the work's politics only if it is named; named, the provisional vocabulary becomes a question about who gets to leave things unfinished, and why.
Closer to Grey
2022
Work · spatial installation
- Industrial glass · neon · electrical
- Maison Gaudard, in situ
01 / 06
Combat de Reines, subtitled Medusas, hangs ceramic bodies from a heavy industrial metal structure, in a position of vertical subordination. The forms are hand-modelled clay, concave and bevel-edged, fired and glazed so that copper oxide applied to the lower interior triggers a chemical reaction during firing, contaminating the upper body with notes of red. Soft, jellyfish-like shapes, they are held aloft by weighty supports, a tension between the apparent lightness of the organic forms and the constriction of the frame that decides where they hang. 169 × 85 × 25 cm.
The title names a Valais institution: the combat de reines, the cow fights in which Hérens cows are put horn-to-horn each spring to decide the queen of the herd, sold as folklore, but really a ritual of sanctioned dominance staged between female bodies for human spectacle. Applied to these suspended, female-shaped forms, the title marks a combat that is already over. The bodies are not fighting; they hang where a structure decided elsewhere has placed them. Medusas names what they resemble and what they cannot do. A jellyfish moves only through the medium that carries it, and here there is no medium, only suspension. The viewer meets the result, not the fight.
The redness is the work's one refusal. Copper-oxide red emerges from inside the clay during firing: internal contamination, not surface decoration; the body reddens from within, through the conditions the firing puts it through. The structure can fix the form's position in space but not its colour: the only freedom left to the suspended body is the chemistry of its own making. And the encounter is intimate by design. At 169 cm, just under average human height in the Valais, these are bodies the size of yours, met at eye level, with the metal cage standing taller. You are placed between them.
Combat de Reines
2022
Work · suspended ceramics
- Ceramic · copper-oxide glaze · metal
- 169 × 85 × 25 cm
01 / 04
EXIT #1 — EXIT #2 is a pair of hollow stainless-steel structures, each built from eight shaped and assembled bars, each 169 × 85 × 25 cm, partly filled with Cubensis Albino mycelium. Steel is an inherently hostile environment for life, its sharp finishes generating danger and discomfort; yet its chromium content lets it self-heal, forming a passive protective film in the presence of oxygen. The mycelium is placed in a setting that cannot sustain it: a forced, almost impossible encounter that would not occur in nature.
The mycelium was inoculated three weeks before the opening. It did not fruit and it did not die quickly; it did what mycelium does in a hostile substrate: slowed, thinned, retreated to the few tolerable pockets, and continued in dormancy, visibly diminished across the six weeks of the show. The structure is not preserving the organism; it is documenting its slow loss. Against this, the steel's self-healing chromium film: stainless steel is the one metal that answers its own damage by regenerating its surface, resilient in the way the institutions built from it (storage units, surgical tables, careers) are resilient. The work's quiet argument is that the metal heals and the organism does not. Resilience is uneven; it is distributed by what you are made of.
EXIT names the impossibility built in. Steel offers only one direction: out. There is no equilibrium in which steel and mycelium share a volume comfortably; the organism can die back or be removed by a technician's hand, but it cannot stay and live. The doubling of the two structures insists this is not the accident of one container but the condition of the substrate. And the organism is a charged one: Cubensis Albino A+ is a psilocybin species, chosen here not for any pharmacology but because it is the people's mushroom, one of the most accessible ways to begin working with a living organism outside agriculture. The work is not about altered states; the legal and cultural charge is simply in the room, named rather than hidden.
EXIT #1 — EXIT #2
2022
Work · steel + living mycelium
- Stainless steel · Cubensis Albino mycelium
- 169 × 85 × 25 cm each (×2)
01 / 04
