Crémaillère

La Crémaillère is born from a collaboration with Elias Würsten.

The “house warming party” (Crémaillère) brings together the experiments and the work carried out by Rachel Morend and Elias Würsten during their residency at the Grenette de la Ferme-Asile. For a month, the two artists appropriated the space and gradually transformed its various rooms into hybrid, playful and interactive machine rooms combining movement, space and sound with irony and facetie.

Graduated from EDHEA in 2022, Rachel Morend and Elias Würsten are interested in the movement and diversion of recovered materials and heterogeneous objects, electronics and mechanics. As Rachel Morend draws her inspiration from contemporary agriculture and the absurdity of our society, Elias Würsten humorously questions our relationship to technology.

Launched as part of the festival Fais comme chez toi (Make yourself at home), La Crémaillère (house warming party) is a new evolving residence that aims to support emerging visual artists, transforming the Grenette into a collective place of work, reflection and production.

The two artists built an interactive sound machine with second-hand objects.

La Crémaillère (‘Hand the rack’) is an expression that comes from a medieval tradition where one invited to eat with the people who had contributed to the construction of a house. We suspended the pot over the fire using a rack, a notched iron rod that used to adjust the height of the container. The formula is still widely used today in the current vocabulary to designate an organized party to celebrate an move. After a
month of working residency, the rack celebrates the installation of Rachel Morend and from Elias Würsten to the Grenette de la Ferme-Asile. It is also a nod to the mechanical device that is at the origin of the expression, because the setting in motion occupies a central place in the process of creation of the two artists and is inherent in all the works exhibited.
La Crémaillère presents kinetic sculptures composed of assemblies of materials and original objects that combine movement and sound.

If some works are autonomous and move independently, others are set in motion and are deployed only at through direct interactions with the public.
At the origin of this project, there is a desire to bring together the work of two artists who have centers of common interest as well as practices that respond to each other: mechanical transmission, sound, recovery, diversion, humor and self-learning. Passionate about mechanics, Elias Würsten and Rachel Morend carefully study the mechanisms of objects he and they recover from landfills, at the farm or in second-hand stores to create their works. He and she strip them of their function and their primary meaning and assemble them with other materials that he and she then set in motion using electrical circuits, electronic systems or through human interactions. united and connected to each other with
others, disparate artifacts turn into mobile hybrid machines with retro and the precarious and ephemeral balance: they turn, they sound, they hit, they squeak, like their collaborative work entitled La Crémaillère, which inevitably recalls certain works of Jean Tinguely or the Fischli and Weiss duo. Carried out in situ, this construction comes to life by subtle chain reactions when the public presses the red switch, picking up the
telephone – which sounds every ten minutes – whether it presses the trigger of the drill or whether it activates the mechanical pedal.