Faux départ, the new exhibition by Maxime Bagni and curated by Anne-Laure Peressin, takes over the basement of POUSH just as the venue is preparing to close its doors. This context of an imminent move becomes the raw material for an immersive fiction, built on the theme of departure.

At the end of a dark corridor, a deserted space—an office? A workshop? A warehouse? The traces of an anonymous occupant accumulate: a forger obsessed with the meticulous recreation of everyday objects. Here, everything bears his careful signature: he preserves the form but alters the material, diverts the substance, and neutralizes the use. From metal-sculpted pencils to fragments of the floor, fractured and then re-composed in a logic that eludes us.

Nothing is what it seems. And yet, nothing seeks to deceive. The illusion is not a trap but a hypothesis. These impeccable yet inoperative objects shift reality toward a more concrete double than the original: a simulacrum¹. Detached from any lived experience, they no longer refer to a referent but to a reconstructed—hyperreal—reality where the simulation precedes, replaces, and ultimately dissolves what it represents.

The fiction reaches its point of tension in the staging of the forger's "departure"—orchestrated by himself. In the space, a multiplied pair of black legs runs in place in front of a fictional door. Further on, uninstalled furniture, fake windows placed on trolleys, and set elements are displaced or neutralized. Everything seems ready to be taken away, but nothing leaves the premises.

This is not a move. It is the ultimate simulacrum of a departure: a calculated act of evasion where absence becomes presence, and disappearance becomes a staged scene. Here, the work does not merely reproduce reality; it subverts and displaces it, tipping it into a murky zone where it is no longer a matter of distinguishing truth from falsehood.

¹ Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1981: a theory that simulation does not simply copy reality, but produces a simulacrum—an autonomous double, more real than reality itself—which erases the distinction between reality and representation.

This exhibition takes place as part of the Duwoshows.
3 to 13 September, 2025, Wednesday to Saturday, 3pm to 7pm, Rift
Free registration here