La Box du 19 is a dispositive aiming to support young contemporary artists in producing an original work that is also part of the City of Montbéliard’s Christmas Lights event.

In 2022, Le 19, Crac has relaunched its call for applications in this context, aimed at students and recent graduates from art schools in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté and Grand Est regions’ as well as students from the Belfort-Montbéliard urban area. Following a collective jury, the project by artist Léa Chemarin, who graduated in 2022 from the Haute École des Arts du Rhin in graphic communication, was chosen by the 19, Crac team to take over “la Box”, the art centre’s high-rise showcase.


Membrane, 2022
With the winter solstice approaching, Léa Chemarin’s Membrane installation is a work that evolves to the rhythm of the nycthemeral cycle(1). Two curtains are juxtaposed vertically: the first, visible only during the day, represents a clock, an instrument for measuring time; the second, revealed at nightfall, brings together iconographic elements evoking different forms of life that come to life, particularly when humans stop. The transparency of the material favors a principle of transfers and juxtapositions and plays on the rhythmic and natural variations in luminosity. In this way, these two curtain-membranes vibrate at the end of the day in a dreamy cosmic conversation between different inhabitants of Planet Earth.


Léa Chemarin was born in 1997. She lives and works in Strasbourg.
The starting point for Léa Chemarin’s creative processes is the questioning of her own artistic field: what ethics should graphic designers have? What tools should be used? And, ultimately, what are the shared processes? This possible conviviality in relation to art has led her to design “idea huts”, “immaterial homes”, to observe, in the background, the notion of utopia: “without a place” (ou-topos) or, on the contrary, “a good place”(eu-topos). Using speculative narrative forms, she explores the notion of care and cohabitation. Making the invisible visible, modelling the keys to achievable dreams, highlighting the forms of the living, Léa Chemarin’s works claim to be geopoetic research(2) and are “attempts to seize our futures”. They take the form of installations, publications and graphic objects, like so many desired and desirable forms of life.

“Think of this installation as a membrane through which exchanges and transfers take place.
A place of organic cohabitation, because that’s what it’s all about: the porosity of the border.
the eyes of a deer shining in the headlights
the balance of living side by side.
But the more we turn on the streetlights, the more the stars disappear. We need to bring in
something from the cosmos
A collection of images, like pieces of the fabric of dreams, geopoetic invocations.

All of this seen through a window
from a pair of curtains,
Like a kind of shadow theatre, beginning at nightfall and ending at sunrise.”

Léa Chemarin

1 - Or 24 hours: the alternating cycle of day and night.
2 - Term inspired by the poet-writer-essayist Kenneth White, using it in 1978. “Geopoetics is a transdisciplinary theory-practice applicable to all the domains of life and research. Its aim is to re-establish and enrich the Humanity-Earth relationship long since deteriorated when not totally destroyed, with consequences now well documented on the ecological, psychological and intellectual plane. Geopoetics presents new existential perspectives in an open world.” (www.kennethwhite.org).