Camille Kachani Beirut, Lebanon, b. 1963

Camille Kachani’s work unfolds in a field of tension where nature and culture, familiarity and unease, functionality and absurdity constantly overlap. Starting from a close observation of everyday life, the artist subverts ordinary objects by removing them from their original context and imbuing them with new layers of meaning. Books sprout branches, tools transform into hybrid organisms, furniture unfolds into vegetal landscapes — his sculptures destabilize the notion of domesticated matter, revealing a quiet insurgency of the natural world against human artifice.

The duality between organic forms and human construction permeates his production, creating a space of visual and conceptual ambiguity. In his sculptures and assemblages, Kachani disrupts conventional ideas of function and form, generating a sense of estrangement that oscillates between enchantment and discomfort. What might appear to be a simple utilitarian object becomes, under his gaze, a mutable entity charged with latent narratives.

Kachani’s personal history — shaped by exile and the experience of moving between Lebanon and Brazil — informs his ongoing investigation of identity and belonging. In his work, memory materializes through reorganized fragments, suggesting that culture and identity are processes of perpetual reinvention. His appropriation and transformation of found and often discarded materials introduces a critical dimension: through absurdity and irony, the artist comments on consumer excess and the paradoxical relationship between technological progress and waste.

Beyond its symbolic force, his work invites reflection on the passage of time and the transformation of the materials that surround us. Like an archaeologist of the present, Kachani dismantles, reconfigures, and returns to the viewer a world in which the boundaries between the human and the natural, the functional and the inert, are continually brought into question.

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