arles — off-RCA 3rd Edition
の : Trace
The title の:Trace uses the Japanese particle “の” (no), meaning “of” or “belonging to.”
Each chapter is a trace of off-RCA — a fragment of memory, a space of emotion, a held breath.
Exhibition Overview - の : Trace, 7-13th of July 2025
A Sensory Encounter Between Image and Atmosphere
This exhibition brings together photographic, film, sculptural, and process-based works by Royal College of Art alumni.
Each artist speaks in their own material and conceptual language.
off-RCA does not interfere with that voice — it listens.
What holds these works together is scent as emotional structure: not imposed, but ambient. Not expressive, but atmospheric.
The Exhibition Unfolds in Four Emotional Spaces, in two galleries
1- Galerie Éphémère
24 rue de l’hôtel de Ville, 13200, Arles.
の: memory
Featuring Yuan, Patricio Villanueva , Lotte Cunnell and Misia-O’
Nostalgia and impermanence — explored through analog, AI photography, scent, and sound.
Everything you remember — and everything you don’t.
の: memory is not a recollection. It is a haunting.
This chapter lingers in the space between presence and absence. Influenced by Bachelard and the fragile poetics of impermanence, memory is rendered not as narrative but as residue — scent,shadow, image, and code. Photographs melt into scent. AI dreams in fragments. A candle cradles a disappearing past. Memory here is not held. It is inhaled.
A mist. A trace. A ghost still warm.
の:air
An installation by Misia-O’
This chapter breathes the quiet poetry of impermanence. Here, architecture is not built from walls, but from breath — choreographed through scented veils, suspended dust, and moving light. Inspired by Bachelard’s reveries on air and Lispector’s fluid presence in Água Viva, the installation dissolves structure into atmosphere.
Here, breath is the blueprint.
To enter is to dissolve.
To move is to vanish.
The artworks are housed not in silence, but in slow-moving, olfactive space.Air is the medium. Scent is the structure. The audience becomes part of the architecture.
The scent Murmure, composed by Misia-O’, floats through the room like a vanishing memory — crafted from orris, hinoki, mimosa, and transparent musks. Projected gestures, slow-scented movement, and wabi-sabi ceramics coalesce into an invisible structure — a murmur held in air.
Each breath reshapes the space. Each step stirs a trace.
Visitors don’t observe; they inhabit. The artwork here is not fixed — it disappears as it is experienced.
2- Galerie Apothicaire
46 Rue du Docteur Fanton, 13200, Arles,
の:shadow (erosion)
Featuring Sara Sahores, Danilo Zocatelli and others to be announced soon.
What disappears becomes visible.Erosion is not destruction but transformation — the quiet after the mark, the form that remains when meaning fades.
The works here speak through decay: cracked textures, bleached pigment, frayed paper, and photographic surfaces worn by time. Inspired by impermanence and the wabi-sabi of disintegration, this chapter honours the slowness of vanishing.
The scent, Lapsus, is barely there — a mineral murmur of dust, dry moss, faded wood, and scorched earth. It doesn’t assert itself. It lingers like memory in a room just left. Visitors walk through an atmosphere of reverent stillness, where even silence has weight. This is the architecture of erosion — where absence is a kind of presence.
の:emotion
Featuring Adam Dorgham, Hermione Wiltshire and others.
Everything you felt but could not name. A breath held. A trace left.
This chapter is not a memory — it is a reverberation.
Inspired by Bachelard’s reveries and the fragmented sensuality of Água Viva, of Emotion is where language dissolves and feeling begins. Emotion here is not a message, but an atmosphere. A resonance. A breath without origin.
Scent, light, and image pulse like sensation without form. Emotions surface not as stories, but as frequencies that vibrate across time and space. The scent Resonance — a gentle accord of soft resins, milky light, and quiet aldehydes — diffuses across the space like a memory just missed.There are no objects to resolve, only conditions to feel. Light flickers. Breath lingers. Fragments of visual memory dissolve into sound.
This room is not a conclusion. It is a pulse, still moving.
A space that remembers you even after you’ve left.