This opposition evokes a compressed timeline: from the earliest state formations, where power was first organized and displayed to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, marked by cycles of progress and, aesthetically, ornamental excess. The horse is a recurring historical figure, a carrier of military, political, and symbolic power. From imperial statuary to royal and national monuments, the equestrian figure has long served as a vertical image of authority. Stripped of their riders, the horses in Paola Siri’s work are distilled into pure movement: force detached and liberated from command.

Following this same principle, the way the fragments of Midway Kin are suspended and connected ~ through ladder-like structures, zipper mechanisms, and deconstructed clockwork elements ~ pushes them even further away from the traditional narrative of equestrian monuments. Placed within the artist’s compressed and accelerated timeline, they are repositioned into a post-identitarian, post-human aesthetic. Ornament, within this almost surgical, deliberately clean process of extraction, becomes a site of slippage. Detached from its usual stabilizing and decorative function and applied to fragmented, unstable bodies, it no longer unifies form but instead exposes fracture.
 

This gesture of isolating forms from their original function and symbolism recurs throughout Paola Siri’s practice. It has recently extended into her site-specific installations, notably in the solo exhibition Subcutanean Ghosts at DASH, Kortrijk.
 

By releasing membranes from their usual connotations, the artist creates her own narrative space, where interpretation remains unstable and the balance of power is reversed. Paola Siri Renard peels those meanings and roles off one by one, like an onion.
 

What remains? A world where symbols lose their masters, and movement replaces command.