Concrete Myths
In dialogue with Xolo Cuintle
Romy Texier and Valentin Vie Binet, working together since 2020 under the collective title Xolo Cuintle, present their latest immersive investigation, Chloroplast Machinery (CAP Saint‑Fons, 07.06–08.08.25, curated by Alessandra Prandin). Across the industrial expanse of the Vallée de la Chimie, they treated the architecture of pipes, silos, and beams as living systems: vessels that breathe, fissure, and interlace with vegetal and animal anatomies. Concrete—hand‑layered and stratified — counterposes the factory’s mass‑production tempo with a granular, almost geological sensibility.
In the following conversation, the artists reflect on how industrial spaces become narrative agents, why invasive growths are one of their central tropes, and how mythopoiesis might sprout from the “cracks of collapsing concrete.” This conceptual thread weaves forward into their upcoming solo exhibition at DS Galerie, Paris (October 2025), conceived as a direct extension of the Saint‑Fons project. There, the duo will explore further hybrid ecosystems where myth, ornament, and non‑human lifeforms entangle within the spaces we inhabit.
Interview by Elina Poliakova//
We had this intention to depict a living factory,
where the gears would be flowers, driving each other
in a shared cycle.
Your exhibitions often feel more like constructed environments than traditional sculpture shows. When you start working on a new project, do you begin with an image, a place, or something else entirely?
The spaces we develop for exhibitions, though they may diverge from reality, still take root in it. The context often provides the foundation : the venue, its surroundings, its history, all contribute to shape the exhibition. In a way, it’s what lies beneath the surface, beyond the walls of the closed exhibition space, that fuels the narrative. There is also a formal dialogue with the architecture in itself, where we like to underline its particularities, even if they might seem insignificant.
For example, at CAP Saint Fons, a structural beam is situated in the middle of the main exhibition space. Rather than ignoring it, we wanted to incorporate it in the show by turning it into a model size warehouse standing on lengthy stilts. Architecture frequently influences certain forms in our works. The characteristics of the space is something we tend to want to respond to, with the works being some kind of an answer to it.
There’s a tenderness in how you treat concrete, not as a brutalist statement, but as something slow, poetic. How did this approach to the material develop? Was it always there,
or did something shift along the way?
The approach to the material came quite organically. As we shape it by layering, the first concrete pieces explored the material as a grey matter in which, so to speak, the different layers encapsulated different sections of time. As a layer of dust that would have the property to stitch together distant elements in an anachronic blend of symbols, ornaments and mythologies.
There was a conceptual shift pretty early on when we began to question concrete as a material. Concrete is one of the materials that has shaped our contemporary environment, at least the urban one. Its usage comes with a certain desire of control which is part of human nature: to have control of our environment, of the risks and of nature’s unpredictability. Counterclock from this, we became interested in forms that disrupt the stillness of this material and this dichotomy between nature and culture. Like weeds, or invasive growths that manage to break through these arbitrary boundaries.
While working on the show, Alessandra Prandin, curator and director of CAP Saint-Fons, provided us with a new perspective on the relationship between our usage of the material and time. She was interested in our approach to working concrete, which she thought, contrasts with its typical purpose and usage, almost backward from what it is made for and used as. Concrete is a mass-produced material, known for its productivity, quick application and ability to produce shape in series by being generally poured in moulds. Here the rhythm is altered as shapes appear layer by layer, not through casts but crafted by hand. This rupture with the fast-paced industrial environment surrounding the art center - in a sudden change of tempo - was one of the reasons behind the invitation.
Detail, Decanting Waterlillies (2025), Concrete, steel, stoneware.
Double Roof Self-Portrait (2025), Pine, beech, stoneware, steel, H 64 x L 94 x D 148 cm
Many of your works deal with infrastructure: pipes, ducts, silos, factory roofs. What’s the emotional or narrative pull there for you?
There is definitely an attraction to these infrastructures that encapsulate our fascination with systems and cycles of production. This exhibition in particular was built around a series of analogies between industrial and organic elements. We see correlations with the biological systems in certain networks of production such as tubes that run through the walls, intertwining, to distribute fluids, liquids or gas.
Like inflorescence or the way branches, stems or plants are constructed and sometimes share a geometrical, almost mechanical order. It’s the case with how we came up with the sculpture Lupa (2025). Stumbling upon a peculiar silo architecture, we saw a substantial brutalist embodiment of the she-wolf. What stayed was this vivid image : TEATS = SILOS, united around this common fundamental faculty that nourishment is.
Exhibition view, "Chloroplast Machinery" at CAP Saint-Fons, 2025
Your recent exhibition grew out of a research residency in the Vallée de la Chimie, a site marked by pollution and heavy industry. What stayed with you from that experience, and how did it shape the way you approached the show?
The art center is located on a hill, when you walk out, there is a park with a belvedere that overlooks this land of productivity for miles away. What marked us during our residency is the proximity of the habitations from the industrious environment. It is something you can't pass through. From certain neighbourhoods the buzzing sounds from the factories are constant. The exhibition layout was a direct response to our experience of this environment, to this deprivation that the inhabitants were subject to.
We tried to get closer from these architectures, to understand them but ran onto a series of fences and walls that made it difficult to apprehend the buildings. In terms of layout of the space, we wanted to recreate the physical constraints we felt when strolling around the industrial zone.
We wanted the spectator to discover the show in a fragmented way, the same way we had experienced the surroundings. The visitors penetrate the scene inside a narrow hallway where their first impression is through an intentional crack left to glance through.
Inspired by Anna Tsing's thinking¹, who taught us how ruins offer new possibilities for life and multi-species collaboration, the dire context of the setting was also an opportunity to introduce new narratives and to rethink our relationship to the world. In La Vallée du Silicium (2024), Alain Damasio, offers an angle on the concept of "Mythopoeisis” which he presents as "the art of staging and narrating beings, entities, creatures or forces that help us think about the present and its increasing opacity"². In offering a human scale version of the landscape, we wanted to reverse actual ratios between plants and factories, thus, conceiving relationships with living beings in a less hierarchical manner, in order to bring awareness to more equitable relationships between species.
1. LOWENHAUPT TSING, Anna. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. 2015, Princeton University Press
2. [Free translation] "L'art de mettre en scène et en récit des êtres qui nous aident à penser le présent et son opacité grandissante" —DAMASIO, Alain. La Vallée du Silicium. 2024, Editions du Seuil. Collection: Albertine. 212-213 p.
The approach to the material came quite organically. As we shape it by layering, the first concrete pieces explored the material as a grey matter in which, so to speak, the different layers encapsulated different sections of time.
Double Roof Self-Portrait (2025), Pine, beech, stoneware, steel,
H 64 x L 94 x D 148 cm;
Nepenthes Kerivoula Double-Horn (2025), Breathing Piping System Series
Concrete, steel, H 56 x L 23 x D 18 cm. Photo Credit: Valentin Vie Binet
Manifold Wet-Nurse (2025), Breathing Piping System Series, Concrete, steel
H 42 x L 122 x D 28 cm , Photo Credit: Valentin Vie Binet
There’s a strong tension between surface and hidden detail in this body of work. Was that something you were thinking about from the start, or did it emerge through the materials and forms as they developed?
The factories are not easy to apprehend, as we tried to approach them, we had a difficult time seeing them as a whole. Their shape is purely functional, yet the way they work and their purpose remain abstract, at least to us. It is this part of unknown, that stimulated us, offering something to complete with new narratives. We envisioned dissecting these monuments, cutting them in half, exploring what could be inside. This is how, inside the atypical spherical gas reservoir, a seed grew. There, the architecture embraces a more virtuous purpose, the organic merge within the mechanical. We had this intention to depict a living factory, where the gears would be flowers, driving each other in a shared cycle. However, we also wanted to leave some of these architectures open to interpretation, as an un-finished script.
As for the plants, having them grow and emerge from the wall, here as pipes, is something that interests us in the way that, from an organism, you only show what rises above the surface. Of course there is more underneath, but that's left to be completed.
3." A new branch of science grew up - industrial archeology. This covers all aspects of industrial history, including social and technological history, and also the architectural heritage of the industrial age" — EBERT, Wolfgang, BEDNORZ, Achim. Kathedralen der Arbeit. Historische Industriearchitektur in Deutschland. 1996, Tübingen : Wasmuth. 29 p.4." A new concept now enters the field - industrial tourism" — EBERT, Wolfgang, BEDNORZ, Achim. Kathedralen der Arbeit. Historische Industriearchitektur in Deutschland. 1996, Tübingen : Wasmuth. 31 p.
In Double Roof Self-Portrait, the factory becomes this quiet, distant shape, more memory than structure. Do you turn to nostalgia in your work, or is it more about stripping things down to their essence?
As suggested above, if some of the architectures are dissected to reveal internal functionalities, others are represented fully, as closed buildings. Still on this notion of surface, we were interested in how a receptacle from which you can’t apprehend the inside can become an open door for projection. Double Roof Self-Portrait (2025) is a mind with two heads, linked by a common piping system that irrigates the bodice. In a way, the edifice is stripped down to an essence. Having said that, the shape is still very attached to some kind of memory : the construction is typical of the industrial landscape. So there is memory but also, it’s about emptiness, that leaves room for potentialities.
About factories and nostalgia, there is this book by Wolfgang Ebert and Achim Bednorz, Kathedralen der Arbeit (1996), which compares the role industrial building had in the golden ages of Industrial Times to Gothic Cathedrals in the Middle Ages. In England, a movement emerged to preserve these structures, regarded as part of our history and, consequently, worthy of conservation. A new field, "industrial archaeology"³ surfaced, alongside a new tourism style: "industrial tourism"⁴. It is something that interested us while working on the exhibition. Although, no feeling of nostalgia on our side, it's more about an interest in how these buildings become time markers.
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And then there’s Lupa - half-wolf, half-Xolo dog, straddling myth and material culture. What do animals, or hybrid beings, allow you to express that other forms can’t?
Though they are very much involved in the scenarios we develop, humans are never directly present, at least for the time being. Animals, as much as plants, are the only silent presences. Perhaps it's because they embody stories from a non-human perspective, one that has been repeatedly scorned in western society.
Hybrids, siamese, chimera are trespassing figures that encapsulate relationships we aren’t necessarily aware of. There are way more links than the ones visible to the naked eye. Our research on symbiosis has to do with taking these specific strong co-dependent associations of beings as symbols and metonymies of the big web of relations that composes the world. Species should be seen in relation to one another and their environment, not as isolated individuals.
Maybe more generally, it is also about duality & pluralism as an alternative to binarity. We like this idea that surfaces are more porous than you would think, or at least you can make them more permeable, creating leaks. Like an "invasive" plant that would break the surface. Citing again the latest book by Alain Damasio, that was with us during the conception of this show, he introduces the possibility of "growing myths in the interstices of the collapsing concrete”⁵. An idea that we thought resonates well with this ongoing research.
5. [Free translation] "la mythopoïèse est l'art précieux de faire pousser des mythes dans les interstices du béton effondriste" —DAMASIO, Alain. La Vallée du Silicium. 2024, Editions du Seuil. Collection: Albertine. 212-213 p.
Lupa (2025), Concrete, pine, beech, steel, H 198 x L 102 x D 40 cm,
Photo Credit: Valentin Vie Binet
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