This residency was developed through a first partnership with the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD-PSL), on the occasion of the second edition of the Biennale du Vivant, initiated by ENSAD, ENS-PSL, the French National Museum of Natural History and the newspaper Libération.

Fondation Martell committed to hosting a duo of recent graduates for a research and production residency centred on the biennale’s theme, Living–Non-Living. The outcome of the residency was presented in an exhibition at ENSAD in Paris in September 2025.

Biographies

Shanna Warocquier is a visual artist and photographer based in Paris. Driven by a constant spirit of inquiry, her work explores the organic connections between human beings and natural phenomena, from celestial bodies to the cells of the human body. In 2024, she graduated from the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD) in Paris, received the Dauphine Prize for Contemporary Art, and was awarded the “Digital Cultures – Fabrique du Digital” Production Grant from Banque des Territoires – Caisse des Dépôts Group for her project Red Marble. In 2025, she was selected as a finalist in the photography competition of the Hyères Festival at Villa Noailles, invited to the Jeu de Paume Museum for a discussion with photographer Nick Knight, and exhibited her work at Galerie Romero Paprocki.

Alice Ponty graduated in Fashion and Accessory Design from ENSAD in 2024. Her work questions the garment as an autonomous object that transcends its function to become a sculpture, situated between art and design, presence and absence. Freed from their utilitarian purpose, her pieces become witnesses to an absent past, singular bodies that acquire an independent existence and tell their own stories.

Research Project at Fondation Martell

Rather than focusing on the ongoing and impending catastrophe facing living systems, this residency project explored the notion of boundaries within the very definition of life itself. If something is defined as living, it may be considered mortal while simultaneously striving to perpetuate itself. The living and the non-living appear as two parallel realities not destined to meet. Yet within the space between them lies something far richer than a simple binary opposition.

Through a touch of mysticism, the inert can at times become animated, in the sense of anima, as the bearer of a soul. As an image of care, connection and, above all, a carrier of time, hair occupies “that strange zone where something inert reveals itself to be alive”. Connected to the skin, it continues to grow. Cut without pain, halted in its course, it dies and becomes immortal. Hair remains as a trace of existence, a messenger of our DNA, a fragment of the body. The notion of the fragment is central, referring equally to science and history, archaeology and sculpture—to what can emerge when everything else appears lost.

The project, entitled Like a Painless Wound, began with field research centred on hair and the people connected to it: hairdressers and clients in the Cognac area. The residency unfolded in two stages. The first involved gathering stories and testimonies in the vicinity of the Foundation. This was followed by a phase of writing and transcription, collecting statements that resonated with the idea of hair as a transitional object between the living and the non-living, alongside the production of works in glass and ceramics.

Interim Results from the Residency

Each artefact-object emerged from the meeting of a sentence and an image, of another person’s words and a personal gesture. Manufactured objects encountered narratives that elevated their apparent banality. To emphasise this contrast, the residents chose to work with fragile and precious materials such as ceramic and glass, drawing connections to the language of sculpture.

Each object is contained within a box that borrows from the codes of archival systems. Inspired by the imagery of the cabinet of curiosities, the artists assembled a library of artefacts conceived as independent objects. Together they form a slab, a stele, a shared platform that evokes the aesthetics of memorials and gravestones.

Like fragments of a larger whole or the beginnings of a scientific investigation, the project weaves together, like a braid, the past of a so-called natural history and the present of a history that remains in constant construction. Through the biological dimension of hair, the residents created an archive of the living; through its social dimension, a memorial to those who are absent—addressed both to those we no longer are and to those we carry with us unknowingly, much like a strand of hair caught in the knit of a sweater or the wool of a coat.

Place within the Labo Almanach

This project brings together testimonies collected from hairdressers in Cognac. While these accounts served as a foundation for the artists’ research, they also constitute potential resources for the Labo Almanach, particularly through the connections that hairdressers maintain with the local territory via the recycling of cut hair.

Collected hair is reused by farmers to deter grazing animals and is also employed in ocean-cleaning initiatives due to its absorbent properties, helping to filter plastics and oil pollutants. Although cut hair is generally considered waste, it possesses a remarkable capacity for transformation. It can be repurposed in craft practices and even used in the production of laboratory-grown diamonds.

Resources Involved

Cut hair collected from the Cognac hair salons Coiffure Passion, Stéphane D., Hairdresser, and Carré d’Artistes.